Talk Me Down

EVEN THE PHYSICAL make-up of a chapbook suggests that whatever it is getting at hasn't found its true from yet. Neither a paperback nor a resolutely bound hard-cover edition, it consists of a few pages, with an occasional misspelled word, tucked stiffly into a cardboard cover and secured by staples along the slender crease. It's a trial publication without the slick veneer that cajoles you into buying a book on sight.

The poet is still experimenting with style in this chapbook. If the poems weren't collected under a certain name, you might not guess that they all come from the same writer because Miriam Sagan hasn't settled into a recognizable tone of voice or mode of diction yet. Her work is compiled largely of images. From the careful control she maintains over each of these, it is evident that she is attuned to the way words balance one another. Sometimes this sense shows through as long as the poem lasts. A structure may emerge that is based on poetic techniques such as assonance, consonance, and half-rhyme; usually, however, the poem depends on caesura or the line of a story for cohesion. But Sagan also has a tendency to distort or forsake style for an image. Her poetry is most interesting when she is sparing of the picturesque language she seems so intent on invoking.

Many of the poems are written in the first person, singular or plural. Yet instead of becoming familiar with this voice--whose pattern of speech changes from poem to poem--the reader becomes aware of the themes that "I" or "we" favors: themes like the sea, a woman's sexuality, a sort of science-fictionalized view of the world, the family history and tawdry yet mysterious American middle- or working-class culture. These themes hold small clumps of otherwise disparate poems together while Sagan is trying out styles of writing. They provide, at least, a way of fitting her work together which makes the overview possible in a collection more satisfying than a chance encounter with her verse in, say, Mademoiselle, Samisdat magazine or The Harvard Advocate (where 11 of this selection of 16 poems have already appeared).

A COUPLE of Sagan's most successful poems belong to the last of these thematic categories. Each brings to mind a genre of music and the environment it thrives in. "Edge of the Blues" is explicitly modeled after the sinuous, superstitious rhythm of jazz, blues and gospel. The stanzas wind through snatches of borrowed lyrics and a pair of lines reminiscent of a slave song, whose plea has been transported into a scene of city night life: "Just show me God, quick./Then let me sleep./...and all the soft windows of the neighborhood/are darkening, one by one." There's a snake in the poem--it is embodied by the restless musicians and their instruments, by a vaguely threatening and depraved woman. And the poet includes a quiet nod to Miles Davis--his recording on Sagan's record player just might be the source of her vision:

Saxophones eat the air.

...Miles after midnight my fingers rattle like tin on her belly, on the tight skin of a dream--"Oh, once I lived the life of a millionaire."

Tell it.

She unpeels her silk dress, unpeels her skin. At the speed of light she slips toward my cold lips, takes a hit from my smoky mouth, whispering "Thin man. Thin man, talk me down."

Lady, you got snake eyes like the dice.

"Company Town" sounds a little like a protest song as it maps out the train tracks and oil tanks on the outskirts of town and gets you watching the workers moving in a "dark stream" to the exhalation of a whistle.

In school no one taught me to see these black pods hanging on naked trees. I memorize the silhouette of empty mills. Give me a revolution to break these lies...

The neat structure of "The Order of Things" is built from items strewn inside a bay. In this surrealistic fantasy, where the images are as barren as those on a Dali canvas, Sagan plays liquids and sybillants, especially, against each other as she describes old women "down by red rock steps" who "sit in the sea up to their breasts." It is rare for her to take advantage of vowels and consonants this way--this might even be the only case where she uses such a technique.

If Sagan's style isn't always consistent or striking, it seems, at least, pretty much her own. When she wedges the hard brutality of Nazi extermination camps between two lovers in their bed, you are tempted to compare her poetry with the self-punishing irony of Sylvia Plath, but you don't get very far before Sagan pulls up short, insisting, "and those things I will not look at."

In "Lost at Sea" the religious imagery is gratuitous; in "Womanlove" most of what the writer has to say is, like the title, banal; "Daylight" is glutted with loaded, but not particularly related, imagery. None of these is totally uninteresting, however--unexpected phrases make them worth looking through. Only the poem about a chop suey joint and high school hangout is boring.

THE CHAPBOOK'S cover features a nude by Degas--apparently it could double for the "dangerous body" in one of the narrative poems. Degas's subject does indeed convey the emphatic sensuality that figures in Sagan's conception of women. Sagan's women are wrapped up in their own sexuality, even tormented by it. One craves bloody flesh; another, the Russian named Ytrasie, whose romanticism pushes her into rather appealing heroism, has black braids which "flew out like whips." Yet they are frightened of their own desires, and tend to suppress them. As a result, they remain unfulfilled or their bodies are reshaped by their lovers' ravishment, while "the soul splits apart, and tastes like salt." The women of her verse refrain from jeopardizing others only to be, Sagan hints, themselves destroyed:

Desire is a small black hole in outer space, not understood, or calculated on, negative matter, into whose mouth we vanish.

Miriam Sagan's women are possessed by a desire that resembles poetry.