Granted

by  Mary Szybist 
 reviewed by Kenny Brechner

    One likes to feel that there is some justice in the world. After all, with so many opportunities for justice to make an appearance, it would be completely remarkable if it never showed up.
Rotten books are nominated for prestigious awards all the time, certainly, however, if our theory is to be trusted, the odds are good that excellent books will be thrown into the mix from time to time. Indeed, the fact that Granted, a collection of poems by Mary Szybist, has been nominated for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award bears out our premise.
    Lightning, it is rumored, never strikes twice. Justice though, apparently adheres to no such restriction. For as much as Szbyist deserved the nomination, Alice James Books, the excellent small press operating out of Farmington, equally deserved this national recognition.
    Though some modern critics have held contemporary poetry in a derisive light, most notably Theodore Galen, who recently described contemporary poetry as “ a cognitively insoluble substance, closely akin to hydrogenated fats,” Szybist demonstrates that this is not uniformly the case. Elegant and rich in style and substance Szybist manages to engage, rather than waylay the reader. Understanding, rather than depredation, is her aim, making the experience of reading Granted more akin to pleasure than to a kind of depleted survival.
In What the World is For, for example, the author explores the divide between appreciating objects in and of themselves and appreciating the effects of objects on ourselves. “Before I started to love you, I tried to love the world: .... It was a long time before I saw/ the silvered moon is no scythe; it is not blade/ or pool: we cannot see ourselves there./ It is only from here that it changes/looks small as a thumbnail, something to offer you/like the blonding shore, like myself./As if that is what the world is for.”
    The task of a poem is to both capture and define a moment of being. It is not enough to simply describe, judgement is called for. Elegance and precision is required to make such a capture, and intellectual clarity and fortitude to define its nature. Szybist exhibits both here.
    As with most poetry books the back cover of Granted is filled with the sort of convoluted tributes designed to make one feel that the book must be the hymnal of a cult of linguistically deranged somnambulists. After reading the poems, however, one feels that it is not Szybist’s fault that her poems were said to “exist in, or move toward, negative spaces, the luminous maddening, almost presences the objects of our deepest desires inhabit.”, nor that Szybist herself is described as having “a gift for being haunted,” nor even that we are told that “Her work’s ambition is the creation of a free human in the midst of the seemingly endless tetherings of desire.” As the coal miner’s clothing cannot avoid coal dust, poetry dust jackets cannot avoid attracting gibberish. Indeed, good work is what remains after the dust has settled.