Bilateral Asymmetry
Review by Lois Bassen
One of the aspects of getting older is a palpable sensation of time as if it were weather or a season. A corollary is the feeling of being displaced, replaced, like a wave on a shore. Aging can feel okay in the scheme of things, but it also inspires resistance. Dylan Thomas’s exhortation to fight against going “gentle into that good night” is a useful mantra. Regarding poetry, another facet of maturity is a facility and preference for form. Enough of Jackson Pollock’s spills and their verbal equivalents, it’s neither nostalgia nor crankiness that inspires classic unities. Mastery does. A current tyro or young star might consider wrestling with the Angel (of rhyme, meter, sonnet, etc.), so that like Jacob’s, a pelvis might be disjointed and s/he would earn a new name.
Now there’s nothing old fogey about Don Rigg’s fine new collection BILATERAL ASYMMETRY, as the paradoxical title immediately proclaims and the poet’s page-by-page images illustrate. My first introduction to Don Riggs was reviewing an excellent handbook he illustrated, POEMS FOR THE WRITING: PROMPTS FOR POETS (Texture Press, 2013). His 2012 essay Making Things out of Words increased my interest. I sought out BILATERAL ASYMMETRY for the drawings, but I stayed for the poems. In his calligrammes Riggs does both (with homage to earlier calligrammiste Apollinaire). One accompanied Uber Blumen Und Madchen (85) that I enjoyed figuring out:
It reads: Daffodils demand folly, as befits those who fly from the keeper of carcasses. In this marvel, Riggs asks, I can always translate from a text, but/how can I translate something from the past? Altogether, that is precisely what the poet achieves in the 121 page collection which are all (but two) unconstrained sonnets. So natural is the language of the poems that you don’t immediately recognize their formal aspects, and Riggs is erudite without pedantry. The title of one of the book’s nine sections, Ars Brevis Vitrina Obscura (Art is short-lived, the view shrouded),puns wryly on Hippocrates’s Ars longa, vita brevis (Art lasts, life is short). Riggs’s accessible language brings to mind the blunt-voice poetry of Catullus.
A book like BILATERAL ASYMMETRY is an antidote to the half century or more of poetry overdosing on Dr. William Carlos Williams’s originally inspired prescription that so much depends/ upon/a red wheel/barrow and/or on the oracular voices of depressed confessions that led William Logan to describe Louise Gluck as “a stand-up vampire.” With a full-bodied collection like BILATERAL ASYMMETRY, you’ll want to keep track of your copy when you share it. You’ll have favorites. Mine was Enjambment (87), the swiftest summary of Life & Art I’ve ever seen. In one of the later poems in the book, Riggs says there is Real Magic (105) that involves metamorphosis/of one thing into a wholly other…as of that wise/…phoenix that turned to ash/ and emerged/younger, stronger, unwrinkled, glorious/…launched into his new life, never to return. Given the range, energy, and beauty of his new collection, the wise phoenix Don Riggs shouldn’t look for a pyre anytime soon.