{"id":48539,"date":"2019-12-08T12:38:53","date_gmt":"2019-12-08T18:38:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=48539"},"modified":"2019-12-10T15:30:32","modified_gmt":"2019-12-10T21:30:32","slug":"long-hours-of-being-in-maximilian-werners-cold-blessings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/long-hours-of-being-in-maximilian-werners-cold-blessings\/","title":{"rendered":"Long Hours of Being in Maximilian Werner\u2019s \u201cCold Blessings\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The poems in Maximilian Werner\u2019s collection Cold Blessings<\/em> seem to come from another time, when the only screen we had was television and our conversations were held either in person or by phone; when we spent time loafing and inviting our souls. Remember what it was like to lie in the grass, watching treetops sway overhead or piles of clouds changing shape? Or just to lie in the grass at all? These poems remember that; they are sense-saturated with the physical world, pulsing with intimate detail.<\/p>\n

Life and death meet here: a cat gives birth in the bedclothes to dead kittens riddled with ticks; a man finds the body of his son, dead by suicide, being eaten by the family dogs. The poems sit on that meeting place: in \u201cMeditation on the Panicum Grass,\u201d an early poem in the book, the speaker muses on a liminal \u201csomething\u201d that\u2019s gone out of him, something that he can remember being there at various events in his life and can recall seeing in others at moments of extremity:<\/p>\n

… on my brother\u2019s face when he kissed his girlfriend in her casket, and on her face,<\/p>\n

and<\/p>\n

… when I asked<\/p>\n

to identify the body of a boy because I was there<\/p>\n

and chances were I knew him.<\/p>\n

This fascination with the liminal extends to geography. Many of the poems are set in zones where the natural and societal worlds overlap and intermingle; there is \u201cwind on the field\u201d and \u201cwind over wells, bottles, and buckets,\u201d and the air is \u201cheavy with pinesap and diesel.\u201d The rural, the mountain, and the seaside are favorite sites.<\/p>\n

I wonder what younger (or lifelong urban) readers might think of these poems. Fewer and fewer of us grow up with daily immersion in the natural world, and it takes memories formed in such immersion, I think, to enter fully into these poems and to let them enter fully into you. Those with no interest in the natural world, who don\u2019t respond to it, will be nonplused, I suspect, by the images welling up off these pages. I used to ride the FrontRunner train to Ogden frequently, and in the evenings I would fill my eyes with the beauty of the mountains at sunset and dusk. Often a fellow rider would look up from a screen, notice me gazing out the window, turn to see what I was looking at, then pivot back to look at me in complete bafflement before looking back down at the screen. According to researchers, young people don\u2019t look around as they emerge from buildings \u2014 or trains \u2014 as we used to do, but keep looking down at their phones. Think what they will see if they read these lines:<\/p>\n

Drone flies in the flowers<\/p>\n

fire their wings, silver<\/p>\n

blurs above their backs.<\/p>\n

Will they see insects?<\/p>\n

(This is not to take digs at young people; we\u2019re all limited by the cultures of our times, and young people are of course as various as the rest of us. If I were reviewing a different sort of collection, I might well be wondering if people of my generation were really able to enter into that poet\u2019s project or poiesis.)<\/p>\n

I wonder, too, if those who grow up communicating primarily through text messages will catch the sonic beauty of these lines, with their alliteration and slant assonance, the stop-start cadence created by the long, slow vowels of “drone,” “fire,” “blur,” followed by the shorter vowels of “flowers,” “wings,” “silver,” “backs,” with the extra bit of length in the \u201co\u201d of “above” enacting the blur of those silver wings \u2014 stylings as intricate and rich as the imagery of those flies in the flowers.<\/p>\n

Not all of the poems in the collection are set in natural or rural areas; at least two are set in Munich and much of a sequence of poems set on Mallorca is sited firmly in the tourist zone. Some of the poems focus on interactions between or among individuals and are set mostly in interiors. In these poems, too, the language is working its magic; as in this passage from \u201cMorning in Munich,\u201d<\/p>\n

I see her half-brother\u2019s fat, ringed finger<\/p>\n

in her room at night<\/p>\n

with the spondaic insistence of “fat, ringed finger” and the troche of “brother\u2019s” disrupting the iambic pattern started by “I see her half-“; that hyphen, too, enacts the wrongness and trauma of the event \u2014 enacts trauma itself \u2014 in the moment and in its endless repetition. From a little later in the poem:<\/p>\n

I want to lean out this window<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve swung open for the last three<\/p>\n

mornings to smoke a cigarette, maybe<\/p>\n

think about the air mostly<\/p>\n

washed of sounds and the sour<\/p>\n

smell of hops from the boilers<\/p>\n

down at Lowenbrau. I want to spit<\/p>\n

from this story, get a feel<\/p>\n

for how far I\u2019d go if I fell.<\/p>\n

I must admit, I don\u2019t like that line-break after “feel.” It makes me queasy. Maybe it\u2019s meant to, but it risks aligning the speaker with the half-brother in his mother\u2019s childhood room, and I can\u2019t imagine that\u2019s the intent.<\/p>\n

That aside, though, the language and cadences of this passage are beautiful, in the same ways and doing the same things that the drone-fly passage is and does \u2014 notice the near-palindromic alliteration-assonance of \u201cI want to lean out this window,\u201d the \u201cwa\u201d of “want” and the \u201cow\u201d of “window” forming one drome, the \u201cea\u201d of “lean” and the \u201ci\u201d of “window” the other; the extra slant-alliteration of “swung,” launched by “I\u2019ve,” swinging like a gate off the end of the palindromic phrase. Then there are the spondees of \u201cthe last three mornings\u201d enacting the compulsion to smoke and the haste to get to it, followed by the extra spondee of \u201cmo\u201d that stretches itself into the long-o release of “morning” and “smoke” and is then cut off by the sibilance, internal slant-alliteration, and short, curt vowels (the \u201co\u201d of smoke aside) in the phrase “to smoke a cigarette.”<\/p>\n

Stop me before I do a close reading of the whole thing \u2014 each time I read these poems I see more of the poet\u2019s virtuosity, emerging through a lucidity of narrative that offers access to readers at any level of engagement. You can read this collection just for content and have a rich and rewarding experience, or find delight focusing just on its technical prowess; of course, either way, you\u2019re getting the benefit of both.<\/p>\n

I do have some quibbles; the poems\u2019 endings don\u2019t always land, and some passages here and there are belabored or confusingly gnomic. There are times when I don\u2019t get the point \u2014 I\u2019ve been bemused each time through by:<\/p>\n

witches<\/p>\n

come out of the ocean smelling of nothing, but<\/p>\n

the way<\/p>\n

they look they may as well smell of salt.<\/p>\n

But these quibbles are small and few. This is a collection that immerses the reader with its sensory pleasures and rewards repeated reading. Long hours of being have gone into them, hours of watching and listening, musing and mulling and feeling. The cargo of those hours has been brought back to us, and it is a great gift.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll end with the poet-speaker engaged in that close mulling of the natural world, in a poem (\u201cDirt\u201d) that lands its ending very well, indeed:<\/p>\n

But down here, among<\/p>\n

the bosky tribes<\/p>\n

of spiders, worms<\/p>\n

like the earth\u2019s<\/p>\n

wet lacing,<\/p>\n

I find reason<\/p>\n

to take my life slow:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When I rise<\/p>\n

from my hands and knees<\/p>\n

and walk into the house,<\/p>\n

I know even then<\/p>\n

this dirt walks with me.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cold Blessings<\/em>
\nMaximilian Werner
\nEduce Press<\/a>
\n2019
\n$15<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The poems in Maximilian Werner\u2019s collection Cold Blessings seem to come from another time, when the only screen we had was television and our conversations were held either in person or by phone; when we spent time loafing and inviting our souls. Remember what it was like to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1663,"featured_media":48540,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2589,35],"tags":[321],"class_list":["post-48539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews-literary-arts","category-literary-arts","tag-maximilian-werner"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/coldblessings.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-25 02:03:57","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1663"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48539"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48548,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48539\/revisions\/48548"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}