{"id":54849,"date":"2020-09-26T10:10:47","date_gmt":"2020-09-26T16:10:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=54849"},"modified":"2020-09-29T12:25:37","modified_gmt":"2020-09-29T18:25:37","slug":"if-the-next-is-better-ill-still-miss-this-world-a-review-of-michael-lavers-after-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/if-the-next-is-better-ill-still-miss-this-world-a-review-of-michael-lavers-after-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"‘If the next is better, I\u2019ll still miss this world\u2019: A Review of Michael Lavers\u2019 After Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nAnyone who\u2019s seen the play or film Amadeus<\/i> will remember the scene where Mozart has debuted his new opera for Emperor Joseph and his palace gang. The emperor tells Mozart (I\u2019m paraphrasing) that it was a good effort, and showed promise and talent, but that it had \u2014 turning to Orsini-Rosenberg for help\u2014how shall one say? . . . too many notes. The scene is, of course, ridiculous and meant to help cement the audience\u2019s identification with Mozart, but I suspect some readers of Michael Lavers\u2019 collection After Earth<\/i> might react similarly. They\u2019ll encounter the true and syncopated meter; all the end rhymes, slant rhymes, and internal rhymes; all the attention to craftsmanship and musicality, and think to themselves, \u201cOkay, but that\u2019s too many notes.\u201d<\/h4>\n

If that\u2019s not you, keep reading. My guess is that you\u2019ll really like After Earth<\/i>.<\/h4>\n

Here\u2019s a good one to spotlight as a test. It\u2019s the book\u2019s third poem,\u201cOn Water, in Childhood,\u201d and it\u2019s 28 lines of blank verse divided into two \u2014 just two \u2014 sentences. This is the first:<\/h4>\n

How it would fall<\/h4>\n

and fill, and freeze and flow, or shimmer<\/h4>\n

or surround or slake; and how it heaved,<\/h4>\n

collapsed, cascaded, how it blazed, carving<\/h4>\n

the cold and high-dunned beaches of my boyhood,<\/h4>\n

how it breathed, becoming less than air,<\/h4>\n

and breathed again and fell again, transparent<\/h4>\n

as a mirror, moving, still, the way<\/h4>\n

it slid and stirred beneath my uncle\u2019s boat,<\/h4>\n

alive and writhing as it buoyed us,<\/h4>\n

diffusing fringe greens into rusty blues,<\/h4>\n

the whitecaps breaking on the sandstone bluffs,<\/h4>\n

the sudden fords, peninsulas, and shallows,<\/h4>\n

Margarets Bay, the delta\u2019s ventricles<\/h4>\n

and the chambered cave.<\/h4>\n

<\/h4>\n

Lavers is doing all the work here so that readers can float along on the imagery and meaning, but it\u2019s work. By my count he\u2019s using 27 alliterations, 20 instances of assonance, slant-rhyme pairs such as \u201cfall \/ fill\u201d and \u201cfell \/ still,\u201d and even a sly end rhyme in disguise: \u201cair \/ transpar<\/i>ent\u201d [my emphasis]. All in one long grammatical tracking shot.<\/h4>\n

The rest of his 38 poems are constructed similarly. Probably my own favorite, for example, opens with a hook that\u2019s nearly a sonnet spoken by a persona voice, a good one, in a couple breaths; well, in three breaths \u2014 two long and one short:<\/h4>\n

\u201cThe Angel in Charge of Creating Earth<\/h4>\n

Addresses His Cohort\u201d<\/h4>\n

Who cares if more important worlds have been<\/h4>\n

assigned to those more skillful, who make crusts<\/h4>\n

that never crack, or plates too fixed to creep<\/h4>\n

or jostle or explode? Ours are the splendors<\/h4>\n

of the makeshift, of the good enough,<\/h4>\n

of cold May wind, wailing the barbed and riven,<\/h4>\n

coastlines ragged as a vulture\u2019s wing,<\/h4>\n

of maggots and voles, a vast legion of catalysts<\/h4>\n

and scavengers the top worlds are deprived of,<\/h4>\n

worlds where the joins are tight, with skies<\/h4>\n

unyieldingly cloudless, only blue.<\/h4>\n

Believe your errors, what they lead you to.<\/h4>\n

After that hook, the poem gets even better:<\/p>\n

Those patches we forgot to water?<\/h4>\n

Call them deserts, hide there all our<\/h4>\n

misbegotten dregs, the scorpions<\/h4>\n

and saltbush beds, blind rats, weird toads.<\/h4>\n

Or how about this, which would sound irrefutably true even if it weren\u2019t being stated by a wicked-cool anti-hero of an angel?<\/p>\n

What\u2019s perfect is by definition free<\/h4>\n

of difference \u2014 but uncountable and great<\/h4>\n

are the variations of failure.<\/h4>\n

This poem is about \u201cthe accidents of beauty,\u201d which is just one of the reasons why I like it, and I\u2019m probably not alone. Readers, I think, prefer beautiful strangeness to the packaged kinds of beauty we’re always being sold.<\/p>\n

Lavers isn\u2019t selling anything, isn\u2019t pushing. Rather, he\u2019s taken notice of a lot and chosen to present it \u2014 to offer it \u2014 in this collection.<\/h4>\n

Offer what? The thoughts of Prospero, translations of lines from Dante and The Aeneid<\/i>, an \u201cAlberta Psalm,\u201d frozen landscapes, the image of his 14-year-old self \u201ctripping on [his] shadow like a new giraffe,\u201d many dozens of flowers and weeds, angels more interesting than Milton\u2019s angels, and plenty more, including what might be my new favorite enjambment of a line: \u201cAll kinds of things exist. Why shouldn\u2019t we \/ be happier?\u201d<\/h4>\n

That\u2019s from the fifth and final section of the book, a single long poem titled \u201cWorks and Days.\u201d I\u2019d expected to find a question mark after the word \u201cwe\u201d; as in, Since so many things exist, why shouldn\u2019t we exist too? <\/i>But that\u2019s not what happens, and what does is a lot more interesting because it causes us to wonder this instead: Is existing enough?<\/i> Shouldn\u2019t there be some happiness to go along with it?<\/i> Lavers seems to answer, \u201cMaybe.\u201d It depends on how you feel about a vision of life presented this way:<\/h4>\n

The end must be<\/h4>\n

to cultivate perpetual astonishment<\/h4>\n

right now, and watch light bail<\/h4>\n

darkness from the flooding sky.<\/h4>\n

Earth\u2019s earth. The rest is silence[.]<\/h4>\n

That last bit, of course, is lifted from Hamlet, but I don\u2019t suppose that anyone will mind. Literary awareness throughout is part of After Earth<\/i>\u2019s music, like one of the instruments in its orchestra, and now I\u2019ve come full circle, which is good. It gives me a reason to let Lavers have the final word:<\/h4>\n

\u201cCoda\u201d<\/h4>\n

From the garden rose the sound of bees<\/h4>\n

that lurched and wobbled through the peonies.<\/h4>\n

We ate eggs and toast with milk that warmed<\/h4>\n

in minutes in the sun while fat drones swarmed<\/h4>\n

and looped like bullets misfired from the fields.<\/h4>\n

It was the sound the mind makes when it yields<\/h4>\n

to glutted blood. I didn\u2019t understand,<\/h4>\n

until one smelled the syrup on your hand,<\/h4>\n

and in a gold-encrusted drunken strut,<\/h4>\n

smeared pollen from its mandibles and gut<\/h4>\n

along your wrist. That morning you had tied<\/h4>\n

your hair, and as you rose and ran inside,<\/h4>\n

it gently bounced, and loosed, and then unfurled.<\/h4>\n

If the next is better, I\u2019ll still miss this world.<\/h4>\n


\nAfter Earth
\n<\/i>Michael Lavers
\nUniversity of Tampa Press
\n89 pp
\n$14.00<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anyone who\u2019s seen the play or film Amadeus will remember the scene where Mozart has debuted his new opera for Emperor Joseph and his palace gang. The emperor tells Mozart (I\u2019m paraphrasing) that it was a good effort, and showed promise and talent, but that it had \u2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1681,"featured_media":54857,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2589,35],"tags":[3830],"class_list":["post-54849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews-literary-arts","category-literary-arts","tag-michael-lavers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/after_earth-683x1024-2.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-06 19:02:02","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\/54849","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\/1681"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54849"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54858,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54849\/revisions\/54858"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}