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It's hard to imagine being gone, and worse, obsolete,
lost, misunderstood. But, it's inevitable that our
civilization will be replaced and we become the
subject of anthropologists and historians. In a wild,
imaginative attempt to clarify who we were, what we
thought at precise moments, and what we made of our
place in history, Jennifer Michael Hecht has composed
her first collection of poems, The Next
Ancient World, as "a sort of
advice book" to our successors and for our
benefit.
There's so much here for the reader—an armchair
archaeologist�to discover and connect. We must have
a story to tell. All good things must come to an end.
We will survive. Hecht's ideas and images accumulate
and catch our notice, subtly replaying and
challenging themselves, and she delivers them with a
mixture of reassurance and anxiety�typical of
someone who teaches undergraduates about the ancient
world while living in the urban modern. Meanwhile,
her own love life offers up an ending that in the
poems "September" and "Felonies,"
and in the stray metaphors of pyramid graves, flags
flying at half-mast, and imperfect humanity trapped
in formaldehyde, seems final, destroyed. Yet, she is
everywhere witty, conversational, and smart and once
in awhile, a little outrageous, as in
"Prologue," one of the many times
architecture becomes physical: "we also have to
admit that the important parts are the parts/that we
remember in the lower parts of our bodies,/the way
the seat of your pants knows something about the
acropolis."
Age-old struggles are put into new perspective in
this advice book while also pointing out the obvious
flaws in how human nature has been portrayed. Hecht
reinvigorates the fall from grace in
"History" by making Eve's action both
feminist and heartbreaking, giving to herself what
was not provided:
Even Eve, the only soul in all
of time
to never have to wait for love,
must have leaned some sleepless nights
alone against the garden wall
and wailed, cold, stupefied, and wild
and wished to trade in all of Eden
to have but been a child.
In fact, I gather that is why she leapt and fell
from grace,
that she might have a story of herself to tell
in some other place.
Since the book itself is the story to tell in some
other place, Hecht is often writing about the fall of
civilization, as in "Waiting to Happen,"
which juxtaposes hope and doom, the pleasures of
boredom to the absence of life. But if a poet writes
about the end of the world with the certainty of an
historian, she might well crash into it.
The Next
Ancient World won the
2000 Judge's Prize for Poetry at Tupelo Press and
heads the publisher's first book list. Due in spring
of the new millennium, the book actually arrived
later on, in September, 2001. In "Convince
Him," a great poem about father-son rivalry with
Alexander The Great as a frustrating example of
accomplishment, we are presented with a wild passage
both shockingly familiar and strangely comforting:
...Out there, these days, young
conquering
ghosts still run naked along the taxicabs to show
the passengers that they love them; that they
will not be abandoned if it all comes down. Even
now
there is the danger that it may yet all come
down.
Despite our luck, there is a chance
that some soon campaign will be disastrous
and our own city sacked: walls kneeling and
windows
popping out of their International Style frames,
the Lever house and the Seagram building
clattering,
while subways threaten to plow up
through the earth like sea monsters
The poems are large and tiny, inquiries and
anecdotes that cumulatively shatter into fragments of
history, religion, myth, popular culture, social
issues and personal experience to be pieced together
as a portrait. Even Blake pads through the book from
"The Innocent" to" Tiger Story"
to the closing "Swamp Thing" where Hecht
captures the paradox of our survival, perfectly:
Apparently you've got to be
vulnerable if you want
anything to happen,
and on the other side of it
you've got to be unfathomably
strong in order to get by.
In order to get through the attacks
and rejections occasioned
by vulnerability you've got to
be almost invulnerably
strong. It's a difficult road map
to fold, friends...
We are formed on before and after, phases and
cycles, and thrive on our ability to put things in
perspective so we can live our lives fully before we
die, and give the next world a turn at it. "But
they didn't fill/the desert with pyramids./They just
built some. Some./They're not still out there,/
building them now. Everyone,/everywhere, gets up and
goes home." ("On the Strength of All
Conviction and Stamina of Love") It's your turn
to explore The Next
Ancient World. But for our successors,
Tupelo Press may want to consider that acid-free
paper is not enough, and put out an edition in tablet
stone.
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