Restored Particulars

Nathan Blansett reviews Margaret Ross’s poetry collection “Saturday.”

By Nathan BlansettOctober 15, 2024

• Poetry

THE POET MARGARET ROSS reads her work from memory. But the phrase “from memory” conjures a bardic, sentimental recitation, and that’s not Ross’s style. Watching her read is like watching someone enter a trance: the voice abstract, dispassionate, and yet immediate, tense, quivering. Ross is a gifted writer, perhaps a major one. When I bring her up in conversation, other poets purr in agreement. For the last nine years, that praise mostly hinged on the existence of a single book, 2015’s A Timeshare. This month, the Song Cave publishes Ross’s long-awaited second collection, Saturday.

Ross has always gone long compared to her many laconic, restrained contemporaries—of the 29 poems in her first book, only three were a single page. Her long poems are also made up of digressive, elaborate—heavily enjambed—sentences, which is why, as Geoffrey G. O’Brien noted when he introduced Ross for UC Berkeley’s Lunch Poems event a couple years ago, Ross’s poems have the sensation of “always both ending and going on.” One poem in A Timeshare, “Responder,” ends with the speaker face down on cool bathroom tile. “[W]ere you near,” she proposes,

        I’d press my ear against the wall
        that is your living back
                and farther back
 
                behind the warm slab
        breath leans into, trying
        to dislodge, would think I
                hear.

 

The first time I read A Timeshare, it was on a hot day in the air-conditioned stacks of a university library. I felt myself swept along by Ross’s radical enjambments, hurtling toward each poem’s halting end. Saturday, which is a moodier, more plaintive book, shows that, over the last decade, Ross has mastered a new type of poem, which is a good thing: poets should not repeat themselves. Her syntax is a little less elaborate, her lines are more frequently end-stopped, and her attention is just as scrupulous, but the poems dispense sparer, more compact insights.

Saturday opens with a long poem called “Macho” in which the speaker recalls the shittiest of shitty ex-boyfriends. Were they in love? Probably not. Probably, the speaker concedes, “in some other thing love served / as cover for”:

I didn’t understand that everybody
did these things, choking or pissing
on each other, having the girl
impersonate a child being molested.
You got somewhere and after
you were where you started.

That harrowing fourth line is blunted by the ambiguous final couplet, with its indeterminate “somewhere”; the effect is unnerving and, above all, thrilling. Saturday is imperiled by men and women trying to one-up each other, inflict pain on each other, and destroy each other, both in and outside the bedroom. “If you debased yourself before a man / debased you,” the speaker reasons, “then you’d have / a little peace.” Placing “Macho” at the start of the book showcases this poet’s beguiling formal and psychological rigor.

All of that isn’t to say this book is rife with despair. Far from it. The speaker is kind of funny and kind of awful, like all smart young people. About teaching composition, she deadpans: “You read something then make / a case about it. That’s how / you get graded.” About her family, memories of whom fill the book: “I believed such inconsistency // specific to my parents.” She’s clever too. About a vacation in the desert: “this was / the present, so you could pay to sleep inside / the homes of strangers / rated via star system.” And she’s lethal about men with whom she’s having sex. I lean in like an analyst:

His body was so beautiful, I wanted
to hurt it. But I couldn’t
do it right from outside.
I had to go in through the mind.

Saturday is a book about sex, but its author is not an erotic poet. I enter these poems first and foremost “through the mind.” They are not sexy or sensuous. They are cerebral, anxious:

I try to send my mind into my mouth, into my hand to touch you with

I repeat
in my head the sentences

I love you I love you more than anyone
ever can and suck your cock repeating them

When the sex poems become totally disembodied, Ross’s writing is at its most absorbing and arresting:

We go upstairs so I can beg him
not to fuck me while he fucks me like
we like. The tv shines an aerial shot
of terraced rice fields
pricked with blue dots which are
hats of people harvesting. The fields
fade into houses by a harbor
which becomes a desert, glacier, skyline
fading into fields again.

Throughout the book, Ross juxtaposes poems about sex with poems about childhood and family, and her speaker’s blunted, flat, but totally bewitching affect resurrects something of childhood’s strangeness. Ross employs the present tense to great effect in recreating childlike logic: one speaker describes the pet turtles she and her sister own, then explains: “They’re girls because we are.” I love the beautiful and plangent internal rhymes of another poem, which remembers a family reunion on a beach: “The dress code always white, white / and tan, and some of the same / shirts and dresses would appear again.”

The child-speaker, wide-eyed and unblinking in the face of the adult world’s obligations and ceremonies, becomes a kind of voyeur, especially in one of the book’s finest poems, “Greenish Picture.” The poem wanders through a childhood home, cataloging its bric-a-brac, including the titular painting. This cheap pastoral that you might find at a flea market or estate sale becomes an object of deep contemplation:

A picture in our room showed a girl
wearing a summer dress and sleeping
with her head against a dog. […]

My mother said
she bought the picture
because it made her think of us
so I studied it for evidence of what I was.

In one of Saturday’s most indelible turns of phrase, the speaker then likens the “heavy, vaguely pleasurable sensation” of being talked about to “having your knees tapped / with the doctor’s rubber hammer.”

These memories of self-consciousness remind me of that significant moment in Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” when the six-year-old speaker announces to herself, “You are an I, / you are an Elizabeth.” I always forget, though, the other dreadful realization that Bishop’s speaker proclaims: “[Y]ou are one of them.” That fact is something by which Ross’s speaker in “Ceremony,” too, is intrigued and repulsed. “Many people,” she bitingly writes, “think people are getting smarter, freer.” 

When the children of “Greenish Picture” are put to bed, we get a description:

a green shelf
where we kept our plastic figures. A skunk. A fawn.
A dinosaur. We arranged and traded them.
The elephant. The seashell with a face.
The other fawn with holes in its skull
from when it was a salt shaker.

That’s where the poem ends. Temperamentally, Ross is interested in cataloging, in listing, in describing—but she knows that no poem will succeed if it merely transcribes the past. Over the course of this final stanza, as the speaker shifts from the indefinite to definite article, and especially when the poem’s attention falls on that peculiar and seemingly animate “other fawn,” I can’t help but feel that the source of these poems’ immense aliveness is their spectacular flair for the concrete (in Ross’s wonderful phrase, “restored particulars”).

It goes without saying that so much else happens in Saturday: a job pinning dead butterflies (“I smelled the corpses on my fingers / when I took my smoke break”), a different job teaching in Beijing (“I was happy / I was angry that I was happy / I went along with things”). It also goes without saying that not every poem in Saturday is equally absorbing. The less effective “Account” alternates vexingly for five pages between memories of the speaker’s caregiver as a child (“I love you more than mom I said to Z—”) and unpunctuated, end-stopped, meticulous descriptions of shoes (“Beige combat with a star stitched on the tongue / Slingback strap across achilles tendon”). The result is inertia and exposition. “Relations,” the poem that precedes it, is a staid single stanza. As it goes on, I find myself longing for the white space that tantalizingly pools between the stanzas of Ross’s more successful poems. Consider that poem’s beginning:

What I know of love I think
I learned there. At the center
of the room, a roofless playhouse
formed a cubicle around
my mattress on the carpet.
Day or night the window stayed dark gray
(it faced the alley) but you could tell
which one it was by who was there.

Compare that to the opening of “Theater,” a high-wire act whose riveting quatrains recount a lecherous teacher at summer camp: 

He split the campers into pairs
and had them link arms, walk across the grass
with closed eyes. A trust exercise. It sharpened
the senses. The campers were eleven or twelve

so some still lived in children’s bodies, some
in bodies from which the child was starting
to disappear.

The best of these poems are not only intelligent but also propulsive, of their time and yet outside it. “How do you get close to a person?” the speaker of one poem asks, and I’m anxious to hear the answer. Thankfully, I only have to wait until the next line:

Once you got past pleasure,
there was pain. No
there was pleasure turning
into something pain was
part of.

Sentimentality, nostalgia—they are anathema to the speaker of this ruthless, unnerving, skillful book:

If you can let them
hurt you deep enough, you’ll be
inside the other person.

Whatever questions I have about pleasure and pain, I hope Margaret Ross’s poems continue to answer them.