reviewed on January 13, 2025

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When Theodor Adorno describes the lyric poem as a work in which the self, “with no remaining trace of mere matter, sounds forth in language until language itself acquires a voice,” he refers to a European tradition exemplified, for instance, in the linden-tree poems of Wilhelm Müller and in the German Romanticism and post-Romanticism, respectively, of poets like Heine and Trakl.

 

There is in the United States probably no corollary to that order of lyricism, in which the lyric subject sings outward toward a natural world that might either bear—and in so doing transfigure—or else refract and ramify its suffering.  With the exception, perhaps, of the Deep Imagists and Richie Hofmann, Jenny George may be the closest American poetry comes to Adorno’s European lyric, her interior meditations embracing the pathetic fallacy as a way of reconstituting the self in the image—or “after-image”—of its landscape.  “I go walking alone in the forest,” George writes in “The Hero,” “as in all the old tales / where the vault beneath certainty opens.”

 

In poems as “clear as birdsong,” to use George’s metaphor, or which shimmer like a William Harnett still life, After Image renders the natural and object worlds with gorgeous and meticulous simplicity, evoking at the same time—to mix my own metaphors—the quiet brilliance of Japanese haiku.  Through such spareness, George engages in a kind of poetic “object-oriented ontology,” revealing the material world as vibrant with fruitings and fluctuations:

 

            A table.  And on it a vase

of flowering quince branches.

 

But a table is only a joke the gods

are making: continuous motion

disguised as permanence,

as a ‘place.’

 

[…]

 

What you think is form

is just a kind of trembling.

 

Through jarring shifts of perspective like this, George outlines the limits of perception while at the same time meditating on the interrelated mysteries of time, endurance, memory, and form.

 

George is especially invested in these ideas as they intersect at the human body, with After Image developing an extended elegy for the poet’s deceased partner.  “Over the hours spanning dead of night / and early dawn,” she writes in “Ars Poetica,” “her face / changed to a stone under the surface / of a bright, transparent stream.”  Likewise, in a poem titled “*”:

 

            You become Not-you.

A postcard of snow.

They tell me you

are at ‘rest.’

In the window’s cold

rectangle: a rose arbor

shipwrecked in a white field.

 

As in the heuristic ship taken apart and reconstructed board by board, or in the seven-year sloughing-off and replacement of human cells, After Image asks when, if ever, the series of flows and convergences that comprise a life can be said to “rest.”  That question is adumbrated with particular vitality in “Autobiography of a Vulture,” where what might have been an expected metaphor yields a phrase stunning in its grandeur.  “I find death where it is,” George writes in dramatic monologue, “simultaneous with life.  Bit by bit, I transfigure it. / Shreds of skin, pliant organs / of the interior.”  And then: “I, who am tenant of the partition—”

 

One risk of pathetic fallacy, of course, is that it leads to the sentimentality of magical realism, of which After Image is not immaculate.  “Four black butterflies wove the sheet into a chrysalis / around her,” George offers. “Then the butterflies carried / the bound form out into the bright, etherizing light.”  Another risk is the silliness of Ross Gay.  “Once I stood naked / in a garden eating pancakes smeared with apricot jam. / It was like being born […]”

 

More often, though, After Image resembles in its elegiac nostalgia the Claudia Emerson of Late Wife and the Masters of Spoon River Anthology, as in the triumphant “Eurydice,” reproduced here in its entirety:

 

Today I wandered around

my life, seeing the little agonies,

each one touched by pleasure

as though by a beam of sun.

Do I have these right—agonies, pleasure?

I could almost feel a light wind

moving the curtains.

I saw that all of this was drafts of paper

sailing off the surface of a table,

getting mixed up

and born. The dead are the ones

who really love, but then

only in retrospect. Birds flinging drops

from a sun-splashed fountain.  Great golden cities.

Gemlike berries underneath the leaves.

 

Wondrously telescopic in its after-image of human existence, the poem demonstrates the awe-full lyricism that informs After Image as a collection.  It is difficult for books like this—quiet in tone and subject matter, mood-based, meditative—to find their way onto prize lists and “best-of” rosters, shaped as those lineups are by sociopolitical—and, I would hazard, gendered—assumptions of what poetry should achieve in the present day.  After Image, though, certainly deserved such consideration, and deserves too, I think, to linger long in our collective sight.