By: Ted Gilley

Ted Gilley — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:08:25 +0000

I was surprised to learn that my ‘favorable assessment’ of Andrew Mulvania’s poetry in Also in Arcadia makes my criticisms of the work even more suspect than they already are. Good gracious, watch that flying spatial deixis, Mr. Wells! I’m sure my remarks about ‘Visitation for the Neighbor Boy’ deserve much less of a lecture. Perhaps instead of warning Rattle readers against my reviews, Mr. Wells might give Rattle readers a little more credit. But it could be that his concern is less with poetry than with the deadly serious academic bona fides he displays in his remarks. Far from demonstrating how much art resides in ‘one sentence of one Mulvania poem,’ Mr. Wells has shown instead just how much hot air is needed to bolster his thin-skinned rebuttal.

By: James Bradley Wells

James Bradley Wells — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 02:10:58 +0000

In his review of Mulvania’s collection Gilley’s misguided candor (obvious boredom with lucid description, toothy snarls about “obscurity”) makes up for what he lacks in the “art of attention.” Take a case in which Gilley’s self-congratulatory indulgence in a compelling if clichéd turn of phrase translates into reckless critical analysis. Although generally complimentary of “Visitation for the Neighbor Boy,” Gilley writes, “[t]he poem slams shut with the finality of a coffin lid coming down.” But the poem, and very importantly for this collection, its location in the narrative arc of the book, clearly frustrate such an absolute response to death. By the time we read this poem, Mulvania has blocked out its narrative content so that we know the death of Joe Wolfe is a past event. But Mulvania casts “Visitation…” entirely in the present tense. The last sentence of the poem, quoted by Gilley, uses temporal and spatial deixis to drop us into the scene’s here and now, which is on the brink of taking our turn to pay our respects to the deceased: “Today [time: present], his name, not ours [first person plural deictically inclusive of speaker and audience], / which is why, inside, we’ll [again, first person plural deictically inclusive of speaker and audience] file past him in groups, / as the horrible organ music drags its feet [fabulous language—and smart: we shuffle past the deceased in time with the dirge (and I have been passing over the artful nuance of such moves as the way —or— sounds in “horrible” and “organ” enact lament)]/ and he just lies [“just” renders the potentially simple verbal aspect of “lies” progressive] there [deixis: the deceased is in front of us] like that [again, deixis: the deceased is in front of us] and won’t move [present tense].” Rather than closure—and indeed, the poem is among other things an antidote to closure—the verbal tense and the flood of one-syllable words in the last line push the experience of death into an open-ended present. But not exclusively as a memento mori, though that’s a loosely viable reading of “Visitation…” If Gilley could have overcome his irresistible attraction to his funereal turn of phrase, rather than seeing the poem “slam shut,” he might have noticed that a poem about death—a poem about a past death that is committed to the present tense, to the here and now—is followed by a poem about baptism, “Baptism at Pointer’s Creek.” In particular, a baptism of the deceased in “Visitation…” Mulvania has so carefully sculpted his book that formal patterns and thematic echoes at the global level of the work as a whole make it possible—by design, as Gilley fails to notice—to interpret the juxtaposition of “Visitation…” and “Baptism…” as a translation of the memento mori ‘Remember that you die’ theme into a theme of memento vivere ‘Remember that you live’—with all the mess that such living entails, including, yes, death. A poet of Mulvania’s talent and commitment deserves, to say the least, a less petulant reader than Gilley appears capable of being. Indeed, Mulvania deserves many readers, beginning perhaps with readers of online poetry reviews and comments on those reviews. Here I have responded to a single favorable assessment of *Also in Arcadia*; this response implies that Gilley’s criticisms of the book are even more suspect. I hope that by demonstrating how much art is in one sentence of one Mulvania poem, I have done more to celebrate his work than to warn Rattle and its readers against book reviews by Gilley.

Comments on: ALSO IN ARCADIA by Andrew Mulvania

By: Ted Gilley

By: James Bradley Wells