Portrait of a Couple at Century's End

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Portrait of a Couple at Century's End
Sherod Santos
1999

Introduction
Author Biography
Poem Text
Poem Summary
Themes
Style
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism
Sources
Further Reading

Introduction

"Portrait of a Couple at Century's End" contrasts the private pain of contemporary life to the awareness of global strife. Its author, Sherod Santos, does not give a detailed view of the couple mentioned in the title but instead looks at their situation in only the most general terms. He presents them as the sort of anonymous people who live all over America in warm, respectable homes and commute to jobs that distract them from the fact that they are out of touch with what is important in their lives. These are people who have chosen a life of comfort over openly acknowledging the memories of bad times that haunt them. The couple live a life of quiet discontent, making small talk over dinner and pretending that past arguments have no lingering effect. Santos stands these controlled lives against the international news that streams into the couple's living room over the twenty-four-hour news network, bringing the horrors of modern urban warfare into their staid living room with the same emotional suppression that characterizes the couple's quiet lives.

A version of "Portrait of a Couple at Century's End" was published in the January 7, 1992, issue of the Nation. A revision of the poem is in The Pilot Star Elegies, which was published in 1999 by W. W. Norton and for which Santos was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Author Biography

Santos was born on September 9, 1948, in Greenville, South Carolina. His father was a pilot in the United States Air Force, and his mother was a painter. Like that of many children of servicemen, Santos's childhood was marked by constant relocation. He attended grammar school and high school in such varied locales as Germany, Switzerland, France, and Hawaii and various places in the United States.

In his late teens, Santos bought a one-way ticket to Paris, traveling with no particular plan. Without a work permit, he could not obtain legal employment, but a concierge at the Hotel Racine hired him to serve breakfast to the guests for fifty cents an hour and a room in the attic. Santos spent his mornings working at the hotel and his afternoons honing his poetry at the American Library. Having learned to love what he had once found most challenging about poetry—its difficulty—Santos returned to the United States with no doubt about what he wanted to do with his life.

Santos attended San Diego State University, from which he received a bachelor of arts degree in 1971. He went on to receive a master of arts degree from San Diego State University in 1974 and a master of fine arts degree from the University of California, Irvine, in 1978. Santos earned his doctorate from the University of Utah in 1982, having focused his dissertation on the works of William Shakespeare. After completing his education, Santos began his teaching career at California State University, San Bernadino, and in 1983 moved to the University of Missouri, where he was teaching in 2005. In 1990, Santos took the position of external examiner and poet in residence at the Poet's House in Islandmagee, Northern Ireland, holding that post until 1997. Santos was the poetry editor of the Missouri Review from 1983 to 1990.

Santos was the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He won the Pushcart Prize for essays and for poetry, the Ingram Merrill Award, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, and the B. F. Connors Prize for Poetry. For The Pilot Star Elegies, the book that includes "Portrait of a Couple at Century's End," Santos was a finalist for the National Book Award and the New Yorker Book Award and won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. Santos's published works include five collections of poetry, essays, and memoirs.

Poem Text

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.]

Poem Summary

Lines 1-5

The first stanza of "Portrait of a Couple at Century's End" establishes a commuter traffic scene. The poem starts out on a note of discomfort, beginning with the word "Impatient." The drivers of the cars are looking forward to their homes, where, presumably, they will be comfortable and feel safe from the hassles of their day. Santos compares the sound of cars on a wet street to the sound made by construction paper when it is torn. The tearing of construction paper foreshadows domestic strife.

This stanza ends with what seems like a redundancy. The sheets of paper in the audio image are said to be torn not only "their length" but also "through." This image makes more sense when "through" is joined to the following stanza, to make "through / the walls," which is where the sound can be heard.

Lines 6-10

With the second stanza, the poem shifts from outdoors to indoors, using the phrase "through / the walls" to cross the boundary, as if readers are being brought inside along with the traffic sounds. Line 7 specifically mentions the furnace to evoke the warmth and dryness of the inside of the house in contrast to the wetness of the outside. The furnace sound is identified with the simile of the sound of "a hundred thousand / bottle-flies" trapped in the walls. The sound evoked is no less unpleasant than the traffic sound. By detailing the insides of the walls, Santos implies a hidden, sinister problem in the house, referring to the domestic problems of the couple mentioned in the title.

Like the first stanza, the second stanza ends with a transition that can be misleading. Line 10 mentions a rain, but one not as harsh as the one outside. Readers are forced to question why there is rain inside until they read on to the third stanza.

Lines 11-15

Santos uses the concept of a news broadcast playing on the television to move the action to a third locale, beyond the house and the commuter traffic outside it to Tuzla, Bosnia. Tuzla was a central point of contention during the Bosnian war of 1992 to 1995, which occurred after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. During 1995, Tuzla was hammered by mortar fire, including the single most deadly attack of the war: On May 25, 1995, a Serb mortar killed seventy-two children. The poem shows this bombing program in the context of a television report from the Cable News Network (CNN), which brings tragedy and destruction from far away into the sheltered and secluded world of an American living room.

Lines 16-20

"Eye" in line 18 refers to the television set. Line 16 mentions "darker crimes" in the context of the war, but the ominous sound shuddering through the walls of the house also foreshadows the suggestion that there are things going on domestically that can be considered dark and shameful. The parenthetical phrase "a world outside, a world within" serves as a membrane between the television report of terrors far away and the couple's awareness that there are terrors within their own marriage.

Media Adaptations

Sherod Santos is one of the poets recorded reading at the Robinson Jeffers Festival in Carmel, California, on October 8, 1994. A cassette of this recording is available from the Oral Traditions Archives of Pacific Grove, California.

After the parenthetical phrase, the poem's focus shifts to the couple mentioned in the title. Readers can see that the poem is no longer talking about the news anchor, because it mentions personal matters such as the summer, the meal the couple are sharing, and the work they do. Presenting the topics of dinner conversation in a list such as this trivializes them, showing that, following the horrors presented on the television, the couple's discussion is actually very banal.

Lines 21-25

The conversation about uncontroversial topics leads to an unpleasant topic: an argument the couple has had in another place. Their memory of that argument awakens repressed feelings. Santos presents these feelings as positive ones, referring to them as longings that have been stirred up by the memory of the argument. The poem implies that even the negative emotions of an argument are preferable to living with no emotions at all.

In line 24, the focus of the poem changes again, from "they" to "us." Just as the argument has opened up the couple in the poem to the emotions they have once known but have suppressed, the poem tells the reader that observing the couple's transformation can have the same effect on the reader, awakening suppressed feelings. The subject of recognizing buried emotions is referred to in a deadpan way, as a simple reminder.

Lines 26-30

Line 26 repeats the word "something" from line 25, indicating that the meaning of the memory is slowly dawning on the poem's speaker. This technique of rephrasing an idea is repeated in line 27, in which "our lives" is refined to the idea "shadow-life of ours." The difference between the two phrasings is that the first uses the plural word "lives," indicating the separate lives lived by separate people, whereas the use of the singular "life" in the iteration indicates that a plurality is involved even in a common life.

In lines 28 to 30, the poem reverses direction. Readers are told to "forget" about the hypothetical couple living in the house on the rainy day and to ignore any speculation about what their life is going to be like in the future. The couple's hearts are called "monogamous," which means that they are true to each other and that their problem is not unfaithfulness to each other. However, the poem is no longer interested in exploring the couple's real problem after it has finished using them to raise the broader issue of people living with each other but harboring discontentment.

Lines 31-35

In erasing the importance of the couple that have been the focus of most of the poem, Santos indicates that they are never going to change. The poem uses the image of a boot stuck in mud to indicate that their lives (and, by inference, "our" lives) are not going to be appreciably different in the future. The relationship they have established, which continues to create dissatisfaction, is referred to as "the industry of pain," as if producing pain is the work that these people have set for themselves.

Lines 36-40

The poem's final stanza addresses the emptiness of the couple's lives and the lack of hope that their lives will change. The couple are people of some refinement who eat dinner by candlelight, but their problems are so deeply ingrained that their refined exteriors are used only to deflect emotions. Santos uses the image of a burnt match—a spent article, destroyed, with no further hope that it will have any good use. He extends the visual image of the match head stuck in wax, referring to its being "preserved into amber." Amber is tree resin that has become fossilized, usually dating back thirty million to ninety million years. Scientists sometimes find stuck in amber the remains of an insect that is completely intact. These fossils are used in the study of anatomical forms that have not changed for thousands of centuries. The novel and film Jurassic Park (1990 and 1993, respectively) are based on the idea of being able to revive dinosaur DNA found in the blood of a mosquito that has been embedded in amber. The poem therefore indicates that the couple's relationship will not grow or improve when the new century comes in, that it will never change—these people are set in their unhappy relationship, like an insect in amber, unmoving for eons.

Themes

Empathy

In the fifth stanza, in line 24, "Portrait of a Couple at Century's End" changes direction. Lines 1 through 23 focus on one continuous scene: a suburban home with cars going by in the rain and the news on the television while a couple eat their dinner and placidly discuss their day. In line 24, however, the speaker intrudes on the story. "They remind us / of something" draws attention to the fact that the poet is describing a scene and that the reader is observing it. In lines 24 through 32, the poem uses the words "us," "we've," "our," and "ours" to make readers see how the poem is talking not only about the lives of theoretical people but also about readers' lives.

The poem counts on the fact that readers will empathize with the couple described. Unlike sympathy, which entails understanding another's suffering, empathy requires one to put oneself in the other person's place and to feel his or her situation from the inside rather than from the outside. When he switches the focus to "our lives," Santos forces readers to accept the couple's situation as their own.

Bourgeois Life

"Bourgeois" is a word that comes from the French and means "a middle-class person." It is often used derogatorily and usually while discussing opposition between social classes. "Bourgeois" is used to indicate a comfort with materialism and a conformity with middle-class values that makes a person wish for nothing more than continued financial stability. In this "Portrait of a Couple at Century's End," Santos depicts a couple locked up in their bourgeois values. The signs of their prosperity include the house, the television they watch during their meal, their dinnerware, and the beeswax candles on their dinner table. The couple is financially comfortable but not independently wealthy, because not one but both of them work. Santos contrasts the couple's placid middle-class life to life in war-torn Bosnia.

The couple is evidently so comfortable with their life that they want to avoid thinking about things that might upset them, such as an argument that they once had. Given such little information, readers cannot help but assume that the couple would rather keep their lifestyle consistent than explore the things that really matter in life, such as having an honest relationship. It is characteristic of the bourgeois lifestyle that the couple would put material comfort over spiritual growth.

Topics For Further Study

Conduct a survey of people who watch television while they eat dinner. Determine which programs are watched most while people eat. Write an analysis of how you think watching television while eating dinner affects people's moods.
Write the story of an argument that you once had with someone who is still your friend but that neither of you mentions anymore. Include as many details as you can remember.
Although it was widely covered by the news media, the Bosnian war did not gain the attention of Americans that other international conflicts have drawn. Research news reports of the biggest stories of 1995 for mentions of the bombing of Tuzla. Write an essay comparing the war in Bosnia with any current event that you think Americans are not noticing.
What are the chances that you will be alive at the end of the twenty-first century? Research the latest advances in the science of aging and produce a chart that shows the factors that will affect your long-term survival.
In line 34, "Portrait of a Couple at Century's End" mentions the "industry of pain." Research the condition of the world at the end of the nineteenth century and write an essay comparing it with major events at the end of the twentieth century. Was there more or less suffering at the close of the twentieth century? Why?

Permanence

The imagery used in the final stanza, lines 36 to 40, of "Portrait of a Couple at Century's End" is fatalistic in that it tells readers that the situations described in the poem will never change. The situations are indeed grim. The television describes war overseas; thousands of commuters sit stuck impatiently in traffic; and in the living room of one house, a couple talks about the summer in order to avoid acknowledging their unhappy situation. When it comes up, the quarrel in Iowa is seen as an opportunity to let emotions flow again, but by the final stanza, the couple, as well as everyone else mentioned or referred to in the poem, including the speaker and the reader, are said to be stuck in the maddening patterns they have lived in, presumably doomed to stay dissatisfied forever. The images that Santos uses to imply this state of suspended animation are the boot stuck in the mud, the amber that has been known to imprison life forms for millions of years, and the candle wax that solidifies around the burnt matchstick.

Optimism

The end of the century is used in "Portrait of a Couple at Century's End" to imply a turning point, a time when the wrongs of the past can be set right. It is mentioned in the title, but after that this cause for hope is left to linger in the back of the reader's mind while the poem goes on to concentrate on other matters, such as traffic, the international news, and the tension in the couple's living room.

The idea of the passage of time and its ability to clear up old, lingering wounds is raised in the fifth stanza, lines 21 through 25, in which Santos alludes to a past quarrel. The quarrel is presented as a good thing, bringing up longings, leading readers to hope that the resurrection of buried emotions can mean that the wounds can be healed once and for all. The wounds are not healed, though. The poem reminds readers of how such moments reflect their own "shadow-life" and tells them that the future of the couple's "monogamous hearts" is to be forgotten. Lines 31 through 35 return to the century's end of the title, using a metaphor to indicate the unpleasant fact that the turn of the century will not, in fact, free the couple from the unpleasantness they have buried. The century is mentioned in terms of one hundred years of accumulation of mud, in which the soles of the couple's boots are stuck forever, making them unable to move forward. This idea of crushed optimism is reinforced in lines 36 through 40, in which the couple's relationship is compared to an insect preserved in amber and a burnt matchstick stuck into coalesced beeswax. Rather than moving forward when the century changes to a new one, this couple are doomed to continue with their unhappy, emotionally drained life.

Style

Syllabic Verse

"Portrait of a Couple at Century's End" has little noticeable consistency for readers who try to examine it line by line. The poem does not follow a set rhyme scheme, and the lines within each stanza do not resemble each other in rhythm or length. Santos does, however, use rhythmic consistency in this poem by repeating the pattern of line lengths in each stanza. The first line of each stanza has five syllables; the second lines all have eleven syllables; all but one—line 13—of the third lines have seven syllables; the fourth lines have ten syllables; and the fifth lines have four syllables. Poetry in which lines are measured by the number of syllables in a line, rather than by the rhythm of stressed and unstressed syllables in the line, is called syllabic verse.

Syllabic verse is more common in languages other than English. Japanese, French, and Spanish are examples of languages that are syllable timed. Their syllables are approximately the same length. English, by contrast, is a stress-timed language, which means that it flows rhythmically. Syllable-timed languages are more likely to organize verse around counting syllables, and stress-timed languages are inclined to focus on the pattern created by stressed and unstressed syllables.

Extended Metaphor

Throughout the poem's early stanzas, Santos uses rain to imply an ominous sense of discontent pervading modern culture. In the first stanza, the rush-hour traffic is slowed by the rain. In the second and third stanzas, lines 6 through 15, it is raining in the country being covered on the television news. The couple inside their house are aware of the rain, which drives them to take themselves back to the summer in their conversation. The rain defines the mood of the entire poem.

In the seventh stanza, lines 31 through 35, Santos refers to the rain obliquely when he mentions boots that are "pressed forever in our century's mud." The rain that is everywhere, representing grim oppression, will not go away. The mud that results from the rain will trap the people in this poem in that same oppression. By altering the reference only a little, Santos carries the metaphorical rain to its logical conclusion, mud.

Historical Context

The Approaching Millennium

"Portrait of a Couple at Century's End" was published in the late 1990s, when the world was looking forward to the approach of the twenty-first century. Many cultures around the world celebrate New Year's Day each year as a time of promise, when old troubles can be left behind and a better life can begin. The interest in the change of the calendar is intensified at the turn of each century, with the beginning of another hundred-year cycle. In 1999, that effect was made more significant by the fact that it represented the start of a new millennium, an event that had not occurred since the year 999, well before the Georgian calendar, which is common throughout the Western world, was introduced in 1582.

Because of the end of the millennium, expectations were raised as the year 2000 approached. Some evangelical Christians, for example, their expectations piqued by strict readings of the book of Revelation in the Bible, claimed that the end of the millennium would signify the long-awaited Second Coming, the return of Jesus Christ on the last day of the world. Some people believed that the turn of the century would bring with it earthquakes, plagues, and catastrophe. Their predictions were based on ancient texts they believed foretold the start of the new millennium as a time of apocalypse.

The U.S. government had reason for more practical concerns. Evidence had been uncovered that the al Qaeda terrorist organization was planning public attacks during New Year's celebrations around the world that would injure or kill dozens if not hundreds of people. On December 14, 1999, an Algerian citizen named Ahmed Ressam, traveling with a false Canadian passport, was caught driving into the United States at Port Angeles, Washington, with one hundred pounds of explosives in the trunk of his car. After his arrest, it was determined that Ressam had been trained by al Qaeda and that he was planning to blow up a terminal at Los Angeles International Airport. In early January 2000, U.S. government officials went public with information that they had disrupted terrorist plans in eight countries where attacks had been planned. The approach of the new millennium raised concerns about the sort of terror attacks that would later strike Washington, D.C., and New York City in 2001, Madrid in 2004, and London in 2005.

Neither celestial prophecy nor terrorist attack was the biggest concern as the new century approached. The years and months before the event brought increasing international concern about a credible problem with computer systems worldwide. Called the Y2K bug, or millennium bug, this problem threatened to do widespread and lasting damage. The bug stemmed from the fact that since the 1960s, computer programmers had used two digits rather than four for the year in date codes.

As the turn of the century approached, companies realized that their computers might not be able to correctly read dates after December 31, 1999, that 2000 might be read as 1900. The resulting problem in continuity was predicted to create widespread havoc—that automatic teller machines would refuse to dispense cash; that air and ground traffic control programs would shut down at midnight on December 31, 1999; that electrical, water, and gas utilities would fail. During the last half of the 1990s, the Y2K phenomenon became well known, and public anxiety about the pending calamity grew. Corporations and governments devoted millions of dollars to hiring teams of programmers to go over their computer systems and ensure that they were Y2K compliant. In the end, relatively little damage occurred. The few problems that did happen, such as a brief railway shutdown in Denmark and the temporary blinding of a U.S. spy satellite, were isolated and did not have the cascading effect that was expected to cause life-threatening social collapse on an unprecedented scale.

Critical Overview

Santos has long been admired by critics as a poet of impressive style and vision. Reviewing Santos's second collection, The Southern Reaches (1989), Christopher Buckley writes in the New Leader, "it has been a very long time since I have read a work of poetry as consciously and deftly orchestrated…. Santos' mastery of his craft, of form, sound and music, is astounding." Santos's next book, The City of Women (1993), impresses critics for its ability to string together poetry and fiction in an extended meditation on a single theme. "His book is a sustained series of shimmering, shape-shifting meditations on the ways the self is one's story and one's story is always one's self," writes Deborah Pope in the Southern Review. Publishers Weekly declares that the same collection "makes sense of the vast canvas of remembered love" and that "Santos's greatest accomplishment here is not that he provides answers for the unanswerable, but that he convinces readers that love creates 'words whose syllables we are laved in, / Whose meanings keep endlessly coming to pass.'"

The Pilot Star Elegies, in which "Portrait of a Couple at Century's End" appears, was met in 1999 with critical enthusiasm. Ann K. van Buren writes in Library Journal that "Santos brings thoughtfulness and wisdom to subjects like suicide, war, and extinction. His poems avoid stating the obvious and strip tragedies bare of their most hideous details." The book centers on the extended poem "Elegy for My Sister," written after Santos's sister committed suicide. In the Washington Post, Rafael Campo writes that the book is not one of laments, noting that "this poet seems most concerned with salving our common flaws and recognizing how beautifully human it is simply to need."

Floyd Collins directly addresses "Portrait of a Couple at Century's End" in his review of the collection in the Gettysburg Review. Regarding the book, Collins notes that "Santos encompasses the myriad contingencies of loss in lyrics." Collins realizes the sadness of the poem and the gentleness with which Santos has written about it. "Although youthful emotions appear transient within the larger context of the century's upheaval," Collins writes, "the charred match-end that once blossomed into flame, however briefly, betokens an innocence and passion long spent."

Criticism

David Kelly

David Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature. In this essay, he examines the ways that Santos balances misery with banality.

Poetry in general can be looked at as a balance between ideas, which are insubstantial, and the imagery used to tether them. There is no way to tell in advance what the proper balance will be. For some poems, being heavy on ideas is the way to go, but other poems reach maximum effectiveness with a series of images that require readers to use their interpretive skills to piece together meanings. It would be a mistake to say that a poem has the right style before knowing what ideas are being conveyed. As the rule for writers states, form should serve the piece's function, not dictate it.

A poem like Santos's "Portrait of a Couple at Century's End" is effective because it establishes its own balance, even among the chaos of the subjects and images it presents. As indicated in the title, which situates the couple under discussion as poised between one historical epoch and the next, the poem is frozen, pulled neither toward its worldly elements nor toward its conceptual ones. It is a poem in which humanity's deepest and darkest emotions, the horror and existential weight that come from nothing more than from being, are balanced against a familiar domestic situation that, described in another setting, may seem so common as to be forgettable. The huge is balanced against the small and the profound balanced against the mundane with such deft accuracy that the poem seems to gravitate motionlessly. In some poems, it would seem as if the writer is too little involved in his subject, but in Santos's poem the balance is appropriate.

The important ideas in "Portrait of a Couple at Century's End" are pain, sorrow, regret, and loss. These concepts are hinted at in the early, rain-soaked stanzas, but Santos does more than simply imply these ideas. Near the end of the poem, he states them outright. In lines 26 through 35, Santos refers to the sinister "shadow-life," the "industry of pain," and the "Ho- / ly Spirit of / everything that's been / taken away." "Portrait of a Couple at Century's End" is a grim poem about the aspects of life that most people would rather avoid thinking about, as the couple described here does. Santos even evokes an unidentified "us," which brings reader and writer into the conspiracy of avoidance, marking the ideas as being so dark that most people, like the couple, would rather suppress knowledge of them.

Although the mood is somber, one would not characterize this poem as fatalistic. Santos pulls it away from the depths of absolute misery not only with the images that he uses (which are in themselves bleak) but also with the way that he conveys both ideas and images. Santos does not say much that is good. The most uplifting idea in the poem is a mention of "buried longings," which in any context but this one would not be stretched into a ray of hope. The cumulative effect of the dark imagery and the even darker proclamations is more buoyant than any of the parts.

Santos chooses words in his descriptions that, although not positive, are at least not gloomy. The net effect is that the words tend to elevate the mood of the poem. The details of Santos's images are important. Traffic in the rain does not sound simply like paper tearing but specifically like construction paper tearing, a sound most people associate with childhood and school projects. Using the image of construction paper conjures up thoughts of white paste and safety scissors being used to make collages and dioramas. Inside the couple's house, the walls sound as if they hold not simply a hundred thousand flies but specifically "bottle-flies." These flies are the ones associated not with clustering on the dead but with the harmless domesticity of screen doors and cooling pies. The walls themselves are made of "clapboards," a word seldom used in the early twenty-first century but familiar to earlier generations. The use of this word reminds readers of more than the boundary-setting function of walls, taking them back to older building materials with a mild case of nostalgia. When discussing the destruction caused by mortar fire in the middle of an urban war zone, Santos softens the harshness of reality by mentioning a "terrace." These reminders of the genteel world in the middle of a poem about misery can be seen as an exercise in irony, but the more important accomplishment is that they keep the poem from falling entirely into despair.

The details go beyond the poet's usual responsibility of evoking images with specificity. The details in "Portrait of a Couple at Century's End" poem are more domestic than they need to be. As a result, the objects—walls, flies, traffic sounds, even a bombed-out café—enforce the poem's domestic, everyday side. They ground the poem in the familiar, the nonthreatening, and buy the reader's patience for later, when the poem digs in with flat-out anger.

Although the familiarity of the imagery helps to take the edge off the unpleasantness of the ideas expressed, Santos achieves much the same effect by hyphenating words. Two of the hyphenated compound words in the poem are "bottle-flies" and "shadow-life." The complexity that Santos gives to these ordinary, simple words serves to numb the senses, overloading readers with the opposite of the effect they would get from punchy, snappy terms. Similarly, although the poem uses "boot- / soles" where "boots" would suffice, the extended form surrounds a simple concept with a dreamy fog. "Boot-soles" is a more specific description than "boots," which makes it stronger writing, but the word itself, like "clapboard," sounds antiquated, like a throwback to an earlier, more manageable time. For this reason, it lacks immediacy. If Santos's purpose had been to keep things compelling or lively, then slowing down the poem this way would be a flaw. As it is, though, this poem works best when excess wording slows it down. As a word, "boot-soles" is mired in the poem's language as much as the boots in the poem are mired in mud. Breaking the word in two, stretching it out with a hyphen, makes it slow and lazy. Carrying the word over to the next line makes the concept of boots plodding and domestic.

What Do I Read Next?

Santos has written one book of prose, a collection of essays titled A Poetry of Two Minds (2000). The essays are pertinent to poetry in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but readers curious about Santos's style will be particularly interested in "Writing the Poet, Unwriting the Poem: Notes Toward an Ars Poetica."
Santos's collection The Perishing: Poems (2003) is both mournful and political, reflecting the changed world after September 11, 2001.
C. K. Williams's poem "Elegy for Paul Zweig" has been compared with Santos's writing at about the time he wrote "Portrait of a Couple at Century's End," both in subject matter and in treatment. It is found in Williams's Selected Poems (1994).
One of Santos's elegies in The Pilot Star Elegies is dedicated to the critic M. L. Rosenthal. Rosenthal's book Poetry and the Common Life (1974) is an influence on Santos's style.
The year that Santos was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, that prize was awarded to Ai for her collection Vice: New and Selected Poems (1999). The poets' styles could hardly be farther apart. Santos is dry and academic, and Ai is a populist, weaving figures from modern culture—Marilyn Monroe, O. J. Simpson, murderers, and rapists—to write a new kind of poetry for the twenty-first century.

The effect of carrying a word into the next line is used in an even more eye-catching way when Santos spans the short, four-letter word "holy" across the break between lines 34 and 35. This stylistic maneuver is the most unusual one in the poem and is telling about the poet's method. The oversimplified explanation for why Santos does not keep the two syllables of "holy" together is that keeping the word intact would violate the syllabic pattern of the poem. The fourth line of each stanza has ten syllables, and line 34 reaches that total with "Ho-." This argument is too easy. The poet has control of the words he uses, and Santos could have easily avoided the interruption by using a shorter word for "industry" earlier in the line.

To divide the word "holy," dragging it out the way the poem does, is to diminish the idea that it represents. In presenting the word in its parts, the poem requires readers to pay more attention to the word itself than to its meaning. If the reference was really to the Holy Spirit of Christian dogma, this technique might be irreverent or blasphemous. Santos, however, is using this phrase in a personal way when he writes "the Ho-/ ly Spirit of / everything that's been / taken away." The central idea of the poem is ultimate loss, and the words "Holy Spirit" add a religious dimension. The overall expression would not work if the poem did not negate the power of its effect by reminding readers that they are involved in reading a poem.

Although much poetry is about balance—between form and idea, thought and substance, implication and assertion—it is even more crucial for a piece like "Portrait of a Couple at Century's End" to stay between the extremes, to not give too much attention to any of the aspects of the poem at the expense of others. Santos's poetry has a melancholy edge, a willingness to look at the harshness just under the surface of everyday life. In this poem, much is stated about the harshness, and much is implied about quiet suffering. If this mood dominated by "darker crimes" were not contrasted by word choice and style, it would seem to present a vision of unendurable gloom, and that in itself would not be reality. The situation described in the poem is complex. The one thing that Santos cannot say about the situation is that it may change. That is the point of the poem. With no chance of even hoping for hope, the poem has to find other ways to oppose its own misery.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on "Portrait of a Couple at Century's End," in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

James Rother

In the following review of The Pilot Star Elegies from the online website Contemporary Poetry Review, Rother calls the collection "astonishing" and remarks on the "higher reaches of statement" attained compared with Santos's previous volumes.

With The Pilot Star Elegies, his fourth collection of poems and a National Book Award finalist, Sherod Santos shows convincingly that whatever suspicions his earlier volumes might have aroused that here was just one more New Yorker-style poet specializing in poser-cat's cradles for the highly strung, his work—to paraphrase Ezra Pound—is that of a purveyor of news likely to stay news and not the preciosities of some warm-up act for the Post-PoMo Follies. Which is not to say that his earlier volumes of verse—The City of Women, The Southern Reaches and Accidental Weather—lack gravitas or substance. It is just that the higher reaches of statement attained in this latest book (most formidably in its centerpiece "Elegy for My Sister," a poem in 25 parts) are of an elevation barely glimpsed in Santos's prior writings. There is discernment, finely turned lathework, the business of language on view with undoctored books—but there is not, at least to these eyes, the recombinant vitality of lines like these, from the opening to "Elegy":

   It was late in the day, as I recall,
   her pinking winter-white shoulders bent
   over the backyard flower beds, soggy still
   from the snowmelt that week
   loaded underground, at body heat, in April …

Or this concluding stanza, from the all too brief "Abandoned Railway Station":

   The silence of thousands of last goodbyes.
   A dried ink pad. Stanchioned ceiling.

   And a cognate, terra-cotta dust over
   everything, with the on-tiptoe atmosphere
   of a boule-de-neige before it's shaken.

This is verse that is content to do the work of figuration done by fine prose before it agonizes tremulously over how it's doing as poetry, which is why its ligatures bind without showing where phrase was stuffed into clause or image bound onto afterimage in a not very inspired attempt to gild natural ineptitude with inspired clumsiness. More than just a few lines of Santos's verse need to be under one's belt before it becomes apparent that his prevailing unit of composition is the line rather than some prosodic subparticle. Not, it should be noted, a line reminiscent of a printed circuit board, with transistorized energy nodes pulsing out regularized rhythmical patterns in the form of stresses which recur with only minor variations throughout the length of a poem. Santos now seems to be of the opinion that for a poem to really be a poem its poetry must be generated out of the words that constitute its forward motion and not those that self-regardingly thrust themselves forward against momentum's perpendicularizing grain. Poets with tin ears—and there are more of them out there, duly subsidized with grants and academic sinecures, than you might think—seldom luck into such realizations, and even when by some quirk of fortuity they do, inadequate technique brings the chatterbox of weights and counterweights crashing down. Santos, unlike them, is blessed with a truly remarkable ear. He can negotiate curves of sound, catching waves of rhythmic energy on the fly as though a poem of his couldn't complete its course without a version of rack-and-pinion steering and the tightest of front-end alignments. Watch how this is done in the singularly compact (and stanzaless) "Pilot Stars," where a woman, having returned to her parental home to visit her father, a retired Air Force pilot diagnosed with cancer, lies in bed and recalls the childhood experience of having sat in his lap staring at the cockpit lights of a plane cruising at 10,000 feet:

   … And it's on her skin
   as she's lying there, the salt and shine
   of leaning into him through the tight half-circle
   of that moonward bend, then leveling it out,
   leveling the world in one loosening turn
   for a girl lightheaded at the prospect of a life
   taken up somehow on the scattered narratives
   of all those names, those heart-logged syllables
   by which her father found a way
   (o, how far the fall from childhood seems)
   to chart his passage between heaven and earth …

This is verse as effortlessly maintained aloft as its progress is kept free of bumps, grinds, and other distentions of rhythmic plaque non-stanzaic verse is heir to. The "heart-logged syllables" alluded to are the names of constellations—Lyra, Cygnus, Aquila—her father steered his course by, and which now are lodged in her mind as compass settings of the mortal illness that would soon take his life.

Now, none of this would be of any poetic value were Santos's tracking ability, which is to say his control of story, not equal to the stabilizing effects of his inner gyroscope which keeps everything from capsizing into doggerel. And what that story culminates in is the daughter's realization that the sound of footsteps that she hears pacing back and forth in the bedroom above her own is the sound of her father's "slow, / incessant, solitary dying"

   that would go on
   another eighteen months, and by which it seemed
   some terrible mourning had already begun
   to extinguish the light-points one by one,
   until the dark like the dark she fell through then
   was suddenly storyless, boundless and blank.

Cancer, too, is a constellation, and the celestial crustacean it inscribes among the stars signals, within the earthly microcosm of human cells, the extinguishment of pilot lights. As approaching death snuffs them out one by one we are left, like the woman in the poem, weightless in a storyless dark as boundless as the space separating sidereal flickers and cytological meltdowns. But it is to Santos's credit that his poem never generates the emotional mildew that ponderings of mortality come home to roost can all too easily give rise to. He lets the reader liberate whatever coruscations his rebusin-verse might have trapped between its lines. There's no moralizing before or after the fact.

Nor is there any in what is unquestionably Santos's finest poetic achievement to date, "Elegy for My Sister," which is less about suicide and its aftermath than about the alien presence we inherit from the moment death's will is read and the mysteries such presences weave about our lives:

   … But I begin this for another reason as well,
   a more urgent and perhaps more selfish reason,
   to answer that question which day by day
   I fear I'm growing less able to answer:
   Who was she whose death now made her
   A stranger to me? As though the problem
   Were not that she had died, and how was I
   To mourn her, but that some stalled memory
   Now kept her from existing, and that she
   Could only begin to exist, to take her place
   In the future, when all of our presuppositions
   About her, all of those things that identified
   The woman we'd buried, were finally swept aside …

But more than incidentally Santos's poem diagrams the haphazard "phaseology" of madness and its symmetrically disturbing observation by a sibling who cannot help reading her whole life backwards as an epiphany whose unpacking yields up knots of randomness but no loose ends to tie together. For madness never lacks for order, being steeped in its own dehydrated dreams of drowning, its own deep-sea soundings of heaven's gate. And when it is finally overtaken by the darkness it has courted for so long, it gathers up (in a parody of posterity) whatever remains might have been left behind in the form of materia poetica to be seized upon by anyone who, like the poet, is intent on stripping the stranger in his midst of all disquieting Unheimlichkeit. Sometimes these turn up unbidden and posthumously in the shape of personal oddments, even bits of cosmetic detritus:

   … Shortly after her death,
   we discovered in her closet a large box containing
   countless bottles of lotions, powders, lipsticks,
   and oils. Many of them had never been opened,
   still others had barely been used at all.
   Sorting through the contents it occurred to me
   The box contained some version of herself,
   Some representation of who she was—
   A stronger, more serene, more independent self?—
   That she'd never had the chance to become …

His sister, he tells us, never believed her own name to be designative of anything real or self-authorizing. Not able ever to feel at home on the ground of being she had difficulty grasping just who it was that could claim squatter's rights to a name, or what agency of mulled delirium could assure a proper noun of its propriety:

   Thus all her life she felt her name referred to a presence
   outside herself, a presence which sought to enclose
   that self which separated her from who they were.
   Thus all her life she was never quite sure who it was
   people summoned whenever they called her by her name.

The quest for the means to sustain a narrative whereby his sister's long encystment of dying might be acceptably familiarized—or at least made divinable as a spelling of sibyline leaves—persists to the very exhaustion of memory, at which point it subsides into the valedictory terminalizing of italics. All energy thus spent, memorability circles back on itself and the subject of the poet's elegy is free to enter the golden promise of her journey of journeys—

   A warm spring night. A streetlamp beyond an open window.
   Beneath the sill: a girl's hushed voice exhorting itself in whispers.
   One morning, she leaves the house before dawn.
   She doesn't take the car.
   By noon she finds herself in the business district of the city
   a taxi is waiting, the driver is holding the door, and she sees that now,
   after all these years, she's about to take the great journey of her life.

Sherod Santos's The Pilot Star Elegies is, at the very least, an astonishing book.

Source: James Rother, "A Star to Pilot By," in http://www.cprw.com/members/Rother/star.htm, 2001, pp. 1-5.

Sherod Santos and James Rother

In the following interview from the online website Contemporary Poetry Review, Santos comments on his collections and their relation to each other, and the lyric quality of his poetry.

Poet and essayist Sherod Santos is the author of four books of poetry, Accidental Weather (Doubleday, 1982), The Southern Reaches (Wesleyan, 1989), The City of Women (W. W. Norton, 1993), and, most recently, The Pilot Star Elegies (W. W. Norton, 1999), which was both a National Book Award Finalist and one of five nominees for The New Yorker Book Award. Mr. Santos' poems appear regularly in such journals as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, Poetry, and The Yale Review. His essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, The New York Times Book Review, The Kenyon Review and Parnassus, and a collection of those essays, A Poetry of Two Minds, has just been released (University of Georgia Press, 2000). His awards include the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, the Discovery/The Nation Award, the Oscar Blumenthal Prize from Poetry, a Pushcart Prize in both poetry and the essay, and the 1984 appointment as Robert Frost Poet at the Frost house in Franconia, New Hampshire. He has received fellowships from the Ingraim Merrill and Guggenheim foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts. From 1990–1997, Mr. Santos served as external examiner and poet-in-residence at the Poets' House in Portmuck, Northern Ireland, and in 1999 he received an Award for Literary Excellence from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is currently professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

[James Rother]: The way books of poetry acquire their titles is often curious and fascinating. What led you to choose The Pilot Star Elegies as its title?

[Sherod Santos]: In the navigational world there are such things called pilot stars, those stars in the firmament which, at any given time of year, one might fix on to establish one's location on the earth. This interested me both for literal and metaphorical reasons, and of course I felt those reasons served, however obliquely, the tonal structure of the collection overall.

Do you feel that The Pilot Star Elegies represents a departure from your three earlier books of poetry, Accidental Weather, The Southern Reaches, and The City of Women?

I think there is something of a departure in both The City of Women and The Pilot Star Elegies, though that has less to do with any purposeful design on my part, at least as I began writing those books, than it does with the varying demands of the books themselves. The first is concerned with erotic and romantic love, the second with death, so it seems natural that they'd acquire somewhat different ways of speaking.

In this latest collection you seem less preoccupied with objects and situations shimmering in suspended time, as in (to cite the term you use in "Abandoned Railway Station") a boule-de-neige, than with a more worldly engagement with people and places thrown together in a time-sharing of exile and loss?

What you describe by way of the boule de neige is, essentially, the lyric poem, and it's fair to say that in these last two books I have worked within a much larger temporal framework. Still, my ambition was always to approach that framework through the moment of the lyric, by arranging those moments, somewhat in the manner of a stained glass window, into a composition that's not contained in any of those moments individually. This provides, I hope, the illusion both of time past and of time in the process of passing, just as sunlight through a stained glass window provides the illusion of wholeness and coherence.

We asked you earlier about the relationship of The Pilot Star Elegies to your earlier collections. How do you feel your work has grown over the four volumes? Have particular themes and concerns tended to emerge, without your immanent knowledge or consent, as dominant shapers of the way you write poetry?

As for the first part of your question, I couldn't really say. As for the second part, I can say yes, absolutely. You see, I still harbor the rather quaint idea that poems have things to teach me, and one of the things they have to teach is how to write a poem. Because of that, I tend to try, as much as possible, to let the poem have the reins. Of course, there are unavoidable tics and mannerisms in any poet, but I'm less interested in refining those characteristics into some fixed idea of a style than I am in finding out what elements of style will best draw out the inner workings of my subject.

Many of your poems have a deceptively prosaic character: they are built with lines 12-14 syllables long, they have slant rhymes, and prose responsibilities. How did you come to this style? (Is this, in other words, a response to the Whit-manic tradition of long lines, an Englishing of the French alexandrine, or an attempt to break the English pentameter by extending it a foot or two?)

You're speaking of course about the last two books, and again the subject of those poems dictated the forms in which they were written. In "Elegy for My Sister", for example, I was struggling with a very complicated set of issues, not the least of which was: To what extent is my writing about my sister's suicide an appropriation of her suffering for my art? At the simplest level, who was this elegy really for? My sister or me? And what did I hope to gain by writing it? To eulogize her? To console myself and our family? To bring some sort of closure to her life, her death? To create a more socially acceptable portrait of her for posterity's sake? As you might imagine, I was horrified by those possibilities. And so, to answer your question, circumstances demanded, or seemed to demand, the least possible artfulness or flourish in the writing, a subordination of all those things that draw one's attention back to the writer. I wanted a certain transparency in the writing. I wanted a reader to look past, or through, the words themselves. At the same time I wanted them to be significant, to be mediated through the refining instrument of poetry, for words are, after all, our only real connection to the dead.

A number of your poems, it seems to me, appear to lend themselves to musical settings of the sort the art song composer Ned Rorem does so well. The first numbered lyric in "Elegy for My Sister" stands out particularly in this regard. Are you aware of some of your poems veering off, despite their deceptively prosaic prosody, and resembling a species of meditative lieder, as it were, in which variations on themes are conceived as much musically as poetically?

I'm not knowledgeable enough about musical settings to answer this question very thoroughly, though I do feel a certain kinship with the notion of a meditative lieder, as both a form and a process of composition. One of the things that I admire in Ned Rorem's compositions is the scale to which they adapt themselves, their refusal of what he calls—if I'm remembering correctly—"the master-piece syndrome." And here, too, it seems to me that we're back in the terrain of the lyric, and, as such, I'm not sure I make the same distinction you do at the end of your question. To conceive a poem poetically" means, to my mind, to conceive of it "musically."

While no precise count was kept of the times the theme and/or motif of "backlighting" is alluded to in your latest volume, its recurrence would suggest that things perceived as "backlit" figure rather prominently in your lexicon of images. Does this have particular meaning for you, or is it something that has more coincidental than real significance in your work?

This hadn't occurred to me, though of course that doesn't mean it's either coincidental or insignificant. I suppose memory is, by nature, "backlit"—at least insomuch as it poses what's recollected in the soft- or hard-edged light of the past—and because it's elegiac, the poetry of memory is going to have something of that backlit character.

What are your views on creative writing programs, and their influence on contemporary poetry? Of late, as you are probably aware, critics have begun to blame these programs for (what they see as) a loss of individuality in American verse.

A loss of individuality in American verse? Who are they kidding? Has there ever been a more individuated poetry in the history of the world? To think that our poetry can somehow be characterized, for better or worse, by reference to "creative writing programs" is either culturally naïve or intellectually irresponsible. From the Black Aesthetics of Askia Muhammad Touré to the Steinian poetics of Charles Bernstein, from the engagé of Adrienne Rich to the dégagé of John Ashbery, from the canonical authority of the Harpers Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry to the defensive neo-classicism of the New Formalists, from Miguel Algarin's Voices from the Nuyorican Poets' Café to the Cowboy traditions of Howard "Jack" Thorp and Bruce Kiskaddon, from the hip-hop rhythms of rap to the haphazard rhythms of the poetry slam…. It may be more accurate to call it, not "contemporary American poetry" at all, but "contemporary American poetries." I'm of course familiar with the kinds of complaints you mention—I've responded to them at length in A Poetry of Two Minds, in an essay entitled "In a Glass Darkly, Darkly"—but perhaps you can tell me why it is such unsupported claims are granted such automatic credence. You say, "Of late … critics have begun," but the truth is that these complaints have been around for years, and regardless of how scrupulously and thoughtfully and variously they've been addressed, you can rest assured that in a very short while they'll surface again, exactly as before, delivered to a welcoming audience with the wide-eyed fervor of some journalist uncovering a senatorial tryst. Why is that, do you suppose?

Can serious poetry regain the common readers it once had?

Yes, of course it can, and it has, and anyone who hasn't noticed that is just not paying attention. Not only has the mainstream begun to open its doors to a widening range of marginalized poets, but the last two decades have seen an unprecedented burst of poetry activities, from White House celebrations hosted by the President and First Lady to the formation of a national poetry month; from billboards in Los Angeles filled with poems by contemporary poets to the inclusion of a poetry book as a standard feature with all new Volkswagens shipped in April; from cross-country book giveaways inspired by Joseph Brodsky's claim that poetry should be as available as the Gideon Bible to the distribution by tollbooth operators in New Jersey of free copies of Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." Added to that we've seen a huge proliferation of poetry awards, web sites, spoken arts recordings, open mike nights, and public radio and television specials. All this couldn't have happened without the interest and enthusiasm of the common reader.

What advice would you offer to the young poet? What would you have him do or read for his poetic education?

Oh, I don't know. Read everything, avoid thinking you're a genius, don't settle too early on for what kind of poetry you want to write, and be willing and able to give up everything for the work without expecting anything whatsoever in return.

Source: James Rother, "Sherod Santos: The Refining Instrument of Poetry (An Interview)," in http://www.cprw.com/members/Rother/santos.htm, 2001, pp. 1-5.

Floyd Collins

In the following essay excerpt, Collins describes the attributes of lyric poetry and places Santos's works, including "Portrait of a Couple at Century's End," within a framework of transience and elegy.

I

Thanks to court intrigue and the vacillation of Mary Tudor, half-sister to the late Edward VI, the English crown adorned the head of seventeen-year-old Lady Jane Grey for nine days in 1563. Eventually she was led to the executioner's block to have that head lopped off. When the Tower warden ransacked her cell later, he found a sheet of parchment riddled with pinpricks. When held to the light, the tiny perforations formed verses she had composed shortly before her death. That Lady Jane contrived a solar dot matrix system to record her final meditations seems, in retrospect, less important than her mode of expression, the lyric, the haunting qualities of which Mark Strand has described: "Lyric poetry reminds us that we live in time. It tells us that we are mortal. It celebrates or recognizes moods, ideas, events only as they exist in passing…. Lyric poetry is a long memorial, a valedictory to all our moments on earth." In medieval lyric, the ubi sunt motif emphasizes the transitoriness of life and implies the decadence of the current epoch by invoking an idyllic past. The carpe diem theme of the Renaissance lyric exhorts young lovers to "seize the day" and embodies the spirit of "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die." And yet the temporal aspects of the lyric also embody a singular paradox, inasmuch as words betoken absence, the absence of the objects and images that they describe. Indeed, the amorous sonneteer of the late sixteenth century claimed the power to confer immortality on both himself and his "cruel fair."

The lyric typically eschews the strictly linear development essential to epic and dramatic verse, but this does not divest the form of a remarkable range of moods. It may be meditative (Thomas Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard"), admonitory (Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias"), elegiac (John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale"), apocalyptic (William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming"), celebratory (Dylan Thomas's "Poem in October"), or iconoclastic (Sylvia Plath's "Daddy"). Because the lyric derives from the personal emotions of the poet, its themes may be exalted or quaint or both (as in Richard Witbur's "Death of a Toad"). Most importantly, it draws cogency and force from the poet's facility with language, relying on rhythm, syntax, diction, image, and metaphor to engage the reader. Some critics would even argue that lyricism is not so much a form as a manner of writing, and a second glance at Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, James Joyce's Ulysses, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, or Djuna Barnes's Nightwood compels assent.

On the threshold of the millennium, the lyric remains an astonishingly versatile and vital form, as rich in potential and as accessible as it must have been for Lady Jane Grey. Indeed, one might say that the lyric offers a particularly appropriate vehicle for expressing both the joys and discontinuities of modern life. The three poets considered here have sedulously adapted the lyric to their own needs. What emerges from their work, however, is not a pose or a fashionable despair, but rather a keen awareness, both of the transience of life and the ways in which transience is embedded in the lyric form….

In The Pilot Star Elegies, Sherod Santos explores a wide variety of subjects; inevitably, however, loss is the overriding theme, a brooding presence that shadows nearly every poem in the volume. For Santos, elegy is the purest form of lyric, an apt medium for capturing the ephemerality of human existence and confronting grief. In "Elegy for My Sister," the poet draws heavily on memory as he seeks to come to terms with the suicide of his elder sibling: "Each step seems drawn out endlessly, and echoes / so in memory that I almost think I can feel—in her—/ that earth-bound, raw, quicksilvered weight / a life takes on in that moment it coarses to be a life." But if transience is a dominant motif in The Pilot Star Elegies, Santos also celebrates resilience: the tenacity of a sea turtle cruelly tethered and left to die, the exile of the current Dalai Lama "blessed with the common sense / to survive himself," and the abiding love of a married couple whose shared memory of a quarrel years before awakens "buried longings." In poetry as rhythmically precise as [David] Baker's and as mythically charged as [Sydney] Wade's, Santos forges an aesthetic commensurate with what J. D. McClatchy has called "the world's grief, the soul's despair."…

IV

In his fourth book-length collection, The Pilot Star Elegies, Sherod Santos encompasses the myriad contingencies of loss in lyrics as richly allusive as Wade's and as musically adept as Baker's. In the centerpiece of his volume, "Elegy for My Sister," Santos shuns the traditional approach of translating bereavement into consolation, preferring instead to delve into the psychological and confessional dimensions of grief. In the prologue to this long poem (to which I shall return for fuller discussion), Santos relies on memory to illuminate the tragedy of a sibling who eventually took her own life: "Her vine- / borne flowering marginalia (flowering now // in the ever-widening margins of memory)." But the book contains other meditations equally striking in rhythm, syntax, diction, image, and metaphor, on subjects from a dying hawksbill turtle to the exiled Dalai Lama. Transience is the touchstone of Santos's aesthetic, as these lines from "Abandoned Railway Station" reveal: "Large empty walls, and a water stain, / ultramarine, like a fresco of Perseus, / head in hand, fleeing the golden falchion."

Occasionally Santos's lyrics depict transience within the context of apparently cruel and gratuitous behavior. Here are the first eleven lines of "Sea Turtle":

   Out of a ripple in the sea grass,
   two unhoused fiddler crabs
   sidestep past the almost-dead
   hawksbill turtle turned over
   on the beach and left there
   staked with a length of broom-
   stick and baling wire. The squared,
   inquiring head upstraining,
   the plastron split, and the sun-
   dazed eyes that will not weep
   for such incongruities as these.

Aptly tethered to the left-hand margin by trochaic inversion throughout stanzas one and two, these truncated lines nevertheless betray a rhythmic lilt in the repetition of "ripple" and "fiddler," evoking the frenzied grace of the danse macabre in the consonative phrase "sidestep past." The hierarchy of images allows a spatial structuring that juxtaposes the "unhoused fiddler crabs" with the "turtle turned over," thus asserting the incongruity of a seagoing carnivore become ballast to its own massive heart. Other than the poet's metrical dexterity, the only human presence is the malevolent contrivance of stake and "baling wire." The sun beats down, and the horny plates of the hawksbill's underbelly fracture along the grain, the fissure accentuated by the plosives and sibilants of "plastron split." Despite its torpor and helplessness, the aquatic reptile's eye is moistened by no rheum: "Faced into the current of an on- // shore breeze, the once-buoyant / cradle of its shell closes like / a trench around its breathing." Notwith-standing the metaphor "cradle of its shell," Santos resists the impulse toward pathetic fallacy and elegiac apotheosis. Transience, especially mortality, is in the order of things; moreover, the sea appears hardly less capricious than the malign intelligence that stranded the turtle at the margins of its natural habitat:

   Now anchored to the earth,
   it founders in the slipstream
   of a mild, inverted sea,
   and labors toward it still, its little
   destiny undisturbed by acts
   of forgiveness or contrition.

No amount of rectitude or penance can alter the tortoise's fate as it struggles to survive beyond our reckoning. For all its sedulous craftsmanship and lyric intricacy, "Sea Turtle" calls to mind the Nietzschean weltanschauung that obsessed Robinson Jeffers in his mature years. We should not be surprised, therefore, to come across a poem titled "Jeffers Country":

   Bay leaves season the air
   along Ocean Avenue, which dips down
   to the beach, that cypress-lined, granite-faced
   allegory he worried into something more
   inhuman than a paradise of sticks and stones.

Unlike Jeffers, Santos does not espouse a nihilistic philosophy or yearn for "life purged of its ephemeral accretions." Only in his manner of revolving words and cadences, his desire to capture the grandeur of the phenomenal universe, does Santos pay homage to the poet of the Monterey coast mountains: "He imagined the strophe and antistrophe, / the steelhead nosing at the riverbank."

Perhaps the most disarming and portentous lyric in The Pilot Star Elegies, "The Dalai Lama" focuses on a single flower, a memento mori pressed by the young Tibetan god-king between the pages of D'Aulaire's Norse Gods and Giants:

   the five clean-cut crenelate petals
   of a flower almost alchemical
   in its papery
   likeness to what
   it was: a sign conspired
   to preserve some tremor in an adolescent's
   heart, to round out phyla in a science
   notebook kept for school,
   or perhaps, in fear,
   to summon the wandering
   Valkyries whose muraled lives
   are marked for good by the cinnabar
   leached off its cells.

Santos's speaker describes the dessicated fibers of a once-living talisman as "clean-cut" and "crenelate," a meticulous arrangement of sound and imagery that evokes what is now the mere simulacrum of beauty or remembrance. Scarcely the palpable, full-blooded rose of the Renaissance love lyric, the petaled husk molders to quintessence, "cinnabar" rouging the "muraled lives" of Odin's daughters. But the exotic transmutation proves only another form of transience: "a dead / metaphor carrying on long / past its paradigm // of human need." Indeed, the flower "faces into the future / freed of our small demands on it, / like the exiled Tibetan god-king / blessed with the common sense / to survive himself." Santos's closure conceals a double meaning. In Tibetan lore, each Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of his predecessor; thus he survives down the ages. On the other hand, Tenzin Gyatso, the current holder of the title, fled his homeland for India rather than submit to arrest by the Chinese Communists in 1959. He put aside a temporal realm once as secure as Asgard, forsaking his stronghold in the mountains of Tibet so that he might continue to discharge his spiritual obligations. Possibly the frail "crenelate petals" remind him that the Norse gods are themselves subject to time and fate; in the words of the Elder Edda, "the gods are doomed and the end is death."

"Portrait of a Couple at Century's End" initially looks upon transience with a jaded eye, summoning a fin de siècle ambience from the routine of getting through a day: "Impatient for home, / the after-work traffic fanning out along / the wet streets." However, what waits at the house unnerves the speaker more than the rapid-fire assonance of radials on wet asphalt: "a CNN foreign correspondent tells / how a single Serb mortar shell / just leveled the crowded terrace of a / Tuzla café." Ignoring this contemporary drama, the protagonist and his wife prefer to find refuge in the past, recalling a dispute by candlelight years earlier: "how they quarrelled / one night in Iowa. The buried longings / such memories stir." Obviously, the argument arose from a sexual jealousy that seems refreshingly vital in retrospect:

   So forget for a moment
   the future of their monogamous hearts,
   forget the rain,
   the traffic, the boot-
   soles pressed forever in our century's mud,
   for it's all there, whatever
   they'd say, the industry of pain, the
   Holy Spirit of everything that's been
   taken away, it's all there in the burnt match-
   head preserved into amber
   by a beeswax candle pooling beside
   their dinnerware.

Although youthful emotions appear transient within the larger context of the century's upheaval, the charred match-end that once blossomed into flame, however briefly, betokens an innocence and passion long spent.

"Elegy for My Sister," a cycle of twenty-five lyric vignettes that accrue meaning layer by layer, represents Santos's most ambitious effort to date. Despite narrative elements, its progression is nonlinearly elliptical, relying on image and metaphor to engage the reader. Santos's basic tone is at once confessional and noncompensatory, and the poem begins by offering a traditional disclaimer—"I can already feel her slipping beyond / the reach of words"—that is almost immediately belied by a passage of astonishing visual and linguistic clarity:

   Bolstered by pillows, I'd stayed inside,
   my headcold clearing in the camphored room,
   though I wasn't simply imagining things
   when I watched a field rat bore back out
   from the mulch pile tumbled behind her;
   or when, sinking her pitchfork into the banked
   hay bales, a blacksnake speared by the tines
   wound up like a caduceus along the handle.

Santos conjures an incident from his childhood, as he remembers his sister doing yardwork in late spring. Embedded within a rich texture of language, the poet's images presage his sibling's unhappy fate. While the rat connotes but ill luck and pestilence, the blacksnake "wound up like a caduceus" suggests a number of meanings. The caduceus is the wand belonging to the divine messenger Hermes who, in Greek mythology, doubles as the psychopompos, the guide of souls to the underworld. Did Santos receive a premonition of his sister's suicide? The irony deepens when we realize that the caduceus also symbolizes the physicians who unwittingly collaborated in her death. Moreover, the very transience of Santos's vision lends it a numinous aura: "there she is, made over again / by my own deliberate confusions: bare- / shouldered, burning, imperiled in the yard."

Sometimes Santos's elegy lapses into a linguistic mediation between the quick and the dead, an apologia for his sister's mental and emotional instability: "that darkening shape-shift she could feel / was somehow, through her, handed down, / mother-to-daughter, daughter-to-child." But more often, he evokes her "unabated spiritual yearning," which renders so poignant the Danteesque phantasmagoria of section twenty-two:

   A lead-colored hoarfrost solders the grass
   to the staked, transplanted cedars along
   the new "park walk" on the hospital grounds,
   where a patient empurpled like a fake
   carnation nods toward the thousand-
   windowed front. It's just past ten, the first
   of Sunday's visiting hours, and now,
   in broken files, past ghosted, rainbow-
   coded signs, the families come forward
   from the parking lots … which to her
   still seem some vast frontier the healthy
   into exile cross: dogged, downcast,
   hunkered into the cold, drawn in caravan
   from the smoke-filled feudal towns beyond.

Santos's blank verse sonnet could serve as a microcosm of the poem as a whole, which in dramatic terms resembles the medieval psychomachia or "soul battle." The poet sets the tone in the first line, his rolling o and r sounds slowed to an ineffable dolor by the repetition of d in "lead-colored" and "solders." No frost fires crackle on the lawn, but a dull fume rises, as from a soldering iron. Even the pungent, uprooted cedars are staked fast to the frozen ground. The hospital as an institution had its inception in the Church during the Middle Ages, but in lieu of the stained-glass radiance of cathedral windows, we now have luminescent "ghosted, rainbow- / coded signs." Indeed, few ravishments greet the eye in this purgatorial setting, as families and other visitors move like penitents in "caravan" from "smoke-filled feudal towns." But transience is inherent, both here and elsewhere: visitors and convalescents transgress invisible "frontiers" every day. Santos never attains formal solace in "Elegy for My Sister," but in detailing Sarah's escape from the dismal home of her childhood, he achieves transcendence, albeit metaphorical:

A warm spring night. A streetlamp beyond an open window. Beneath the sill: a girl's hushed voice exhorting itself in whispers.
One morning, she leaves the house before dawn. She doesn't take the car. By noon she finds herself in the business district of the city—a taxi is waiting, the driver is holding the door, and she sees that now, after all these years, she's about to take the great journey of her life.

Like Baker and Wade, Santos celebrates the tenuous and transient nature of being through the felt rhythms and vivid figurations of the lyric form. Each of these poets has devised a personal aesthetic of startling resonance and exceptional power.

Source: Floyd Collins, "Transience and the Lyric Impulse," in Gettysburg Review, Vol. 12, No. 4, Winter 1999, pp. 702-19.