Review of Richard Meier’s book Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar, Wave Books, 2006.

The essence of a thing goes on and off like a switch.

Eventually I don’t believe in figuring things out,

and I just know there is a problem without that benefit,

however dubious it must always be….

(from “For Obscure But Convincing Reasons”)

The same could be said of the reader’s experience of the poems in Richard Meier’s book Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar. However, because Meier articulates his ideas so well, one never feels misled nor even perceives a neglected problem, despite the poems’ often complex syntax and shifting tenses and senses. In fact, one feels just fine about not figuring everything out and can move freely through the book’s six large sections, nodding at and relating to many of the paradoxes the poems simultaneously create and identify.

As indicated by the quoted bit above, one of the main concerns of the book seems to be the essence of “things” or the manner in which “things” exist, or, more generally, the ways in which individuals perceive and conceive of the world. Meier tackles much in that regard. From poems like “Memory of Germany” to “Consulting the Oracle” to “Various Configurations”, the book runs the gamut of possible experiences with “one thing… always dragging/ a foreign perception out of another, he with she,/ or she with child.”

What unifies these poems, however, is the sense of presence/the present they all evoke. The poems speak loudly (and musically), and as they recall the past and allude to a desired future, they establish an all-inclusive and open “now”. Take this stanza of “Your Dream Redaction” for example:

Someone had long ago painted the plaster

behind the white and green floral paper a climbing flower,

a morning glory. The dark green stem in black edges,

the same as the dark pink blossoms,

twists them into opening, the edge of the letters

or a body in prophecy,

the passage in a book that existed once,

and is now the wish to find it.

Here, a very physical image becomes conceptual as the poem moves from the lowest level of plaster on a wall to a passage in a book the speaker now wishes to recall.

This is one example of how the poems often drift associatively (some more wildly than others). However, one always gets the impression that they begin in the world we all share a sense of, before moving to the worlds we create and often attempt to communicate. In fact, that’s one of the book’s most appealing qualities. The poems offer up something for the reader to hold on to and at the same time provide plenty of room to move around in or deviate from.

This is certainly the case in poems like “Villanelle” where Meier uses the familiarity of the form to orient the reader, then works with and against the parameters of the villanelle to explore new content. The form itself becomes a metaphor: “The real villanelle was the situation/ in the moment it had forsaken.” Yet, it still contains all the stuff life is made of; the stuff that moves us:

…Your eyes are the color

of evergreen bark in winter light drifts. Your eyes are the color

 

of lower down the trunk in shadows. Layers that show the century

as undergarments fashion us out of snow shifts.

I was cold a long time before trading personages,

and knew there was no one in the bed to receive them.

Which reminds me—have I even mentioned Beauty? In the midst of all the conceptual fun and flux, Meier manages to handle the subject matter with no shortage of gorgeousness. Poems like “Song of Innocence” move from image to beautifully strange image:

The smaller contains the larger. Red snow falls on the cardinal.

It’s water frozen in the shape of your mouth. You’re speaking.

The innocent pick it up from the sidewalk,

 

wear it, eat it, pass it from tongue to tongue

lovingly crushed and bitten…

In line with the logic established by the rest of the poems, the book ends with “The First Sound They Hear.” And like the other poems in the book, this one concerns movement, both in its narrative and in the way it moves the reader: “the only question they have then being how to get home/ without returning the way they’d come.”

In Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar, Meier explores, discovers, and proceeds to explore those discoveries (often in the same poem). The poems are communicated with clarity and sincerity, but give the reader plenty think about. Most importantly, “they react as if they were real people,/ as in fact they are.”