Nicole Ross

Book Review:
After the Others by Bruce Weigl

     With a new century approaching, Bruce Weigl's twelfth collection of poetry, After the Others, calls us to stand on the millennium's indeterminate edge. This book, opening with the last four lines of Milton's "Paradise Lost," parallels our departure from this century with Adam's fearful exit from Eden, beyond which is "all abyss, / Eternity, whose end no eye can reach" ("Paradise Lost"). Weigl posits that we stand at the century's uncertain gate naked, cold, and greedy; he refers often to a looming future, to give our collapsing present more urgency. We've forgotten, he says, how to love and live simply, how to write honestly and well.

     With all this forgetting, we've also forgotten that God gave Adam and Eve a chance to recreate a world mirroring the beauty and goodness of the lost one. Yet, as their heirs, we've constructed an earth where "we live inside a history that no longer remembers us." Weigl wonders if we reinvent history to give ourselves identity, rendering ourselves powerless because we're unconscious of our present. He examines human suffering, hedonism, and desire, wondering if we can re-learn how to love, be loved, and forgive. As a mature poet working at the height of his craft, Weigl writes that we must weed out "the snare of the devil in our hearts" to pass through the visible end of the twentieth century bravely, with grace.

     After the Others returns to themes of previous books. In Sweet Lorain (1996), forties America is depicted through life in charred, industrial Ohio, and in What Saves Us (1992) the speaker relies on religious epiphanies to rescue him from what he'll regret. Weigl's conversational language, as in previous books, comes unadorned:

     I didn't know
      what I didn't know. I didn't want
      a life of anything then, only
      a life.

Weigl's line and stanzas vary: he uses couplets, tercets and quatrains, as well as undivided lines. He relies on internal and slant rhyme, but occasionally writes infelicitous lines: "She sang out loud about a cloud." His tone is generally ironic, as in "Cult of the Car": "somebody wanted a blow job / on a gorgeous freeway in America" but "it doesn't matter who / this near the millennium. / Ours is a loveless time." Yet, Weigl often softens his poems with rich natural descriptions reminiscent of Edenic beauty:

     an early dove
      coos for someone;
      stars and more stars
      luminous in the sultry garden.

     Weigl explains why he relies so heavily on "Paradise Lost" in this collection: "What Milton helps us to understand is that in return for this loss of Edenic vision, Adam and Eve are given themselves, and for the first time, a world connected to their lives." For their disobedience, Adam and Eve must bear affliction in a world concealing rewards and blessings; though newly conscious of suffering, they also pass into a world of possibility where "rivers were waiting to be named." Unlike Milton, Weigl recognizes Adam and Eve as artists--they possess a new world to fashion and name entirely as their own.

     Using vivid imagery from "Paradise Lost," Weigl charts Adam and Eve's optimistic exit from Eden as it gives way to a dangerous pride; they

     heard the world's music,
      cleaved to that human din
      as if to a god,
      but they could not have known
      how great their loss,
      how righteous
      their cloaks of sin.

As human beings with a chance to redeem themselves, Adam and Eve instead enter "into irony," wreaking havoc again. Weigl explains that Adam and Eve became us as we became them, and asks if, on the edge of the twenty-first century, we're willing to change. Perhaps we have a third chance to leave behind an old world, one where Weigl regrets his own rough boyhood hand that "murdered...so many righteous songbirds / that I will never know their forgiveness."

     The first half of the book, "Providence," details Weigl's slow awakening to the dangers of an indifferent world where people go to "the offices of the nothing that they inhabit / like the newly dead." At times, Weigl risks pompousness, as he liberally criticizes a society he dubs materialistic and disconnected. He distrusts looking to history for identity because we lose ourselves in the "jangled, rising noise of gabble / conjured." The angel in "The Before" shows Adam and Eve "history / unfolding outwards into time, / trying to show them their undoing." Poems like "The Inexplicable Habit of Abandonment in Eclipse" and "Anniversary of Myself" trace Weigl's growing certainty that poets have a calling, especially as the millennium nears, to create an art which establishes our "now"--a poetry that reflects the changed America, the truth redressed and reaffirmed.

     In the final poem of "Providence," "Why I'm Not Afraid," people en masse act as enemy to the poet--they are "takers" who want names, faces, cheap suits, sweet wine, and the future. The poem becomes a litany:

     They can have the flesh.
      They can have the hands.
      They can have the history
      that will not
      remember for them
      what grace may do.

The speaker resigns himself to living with takers until they try to take his words. Then he rallies from passivity, crying out religiously that good will articulate truth, and evil will be unable to use words as a poet can:

     They cannot take the words

     or the seamless music of words,
     and with no false tears
     can they bless or curse words

     into stubborn human shapes...

     Again, Weigl refers to the corruption of mind and history and poses the question: How do we go into the new century? As an exile in a disconnected, commodified landscape where "the ache of cash waits inside your pocket, / ill-begotten weight against your heart," the poet finds himself on an ongoing spiritual quest for understanding.

     "Our Eden," the book's second half, opens with Weigl's description of our world:

     And we came home
      to the bloody village,
      to whole streets of loss,
      whole rooms,
      saying what passed for prayer
      because we did not know how to live in the new world.

This new world exists as the flawed, post-Edenic one, but Weigl postulates that people cherish this defunct paradise where they believe they're "unconnected to the force of need that pulls men down." Weigl feels that humans still haven't discovered how to live together peacefully and wonders whether change is even possible.

     The distraught speaker of "Drinking Song" says, "It's time for the cruelty to stop," as he watches nature and people in rebellion: the earth cracking open and "various cleansings" appearing "across the millennia." Weigl describes a future that could be our "now," in an over-populated world where individuals don't matter, words are commodified, and we've forgotten how to live spontaneously. Yet, some hope exists as Weigl "almost feels" this

     ...summer's
      soaking rain
      all through late flowers
      as if they were growing inside of me,
      a thing we could not account for here.

He calls us to awaken, recognizing the fragile bonds between all people and nature.

     In "Wanting Again," the poet walks through the lushness of "new summer trees" and "blood-red azaleas." He contends with his own loss of control, wondering how he lived so long among robotic people who enjoy notoriety, voracious sex, overeating, gambling, drinking and violence. Weigl counts himself as formerly detached, now becoming increasingly aware of his need to re-articulate his own experiences. He struggles to repossess words he lost while living hedonistically. "Wanting Again" reflects a Manichean sense of the world, good versus evil. The poet, leaning towards good, battles against the nameless "they":

     I needed to find the words
     I had lost somehow

     in a tussle with the evil ones
     in a dusty, timeless square of light.
     I wanted the rain

     on the new trees and thirsty flowers
     to tell me a story
     that could save my soul

     from this spiraling
     to a place empty of words.

Again, the poet posits himself as having had an epiphany, of realizing that there are "evil ones." While this might alienate readers who find self-righteousness stuffy, as the book advances, Weigl clearly has made a choice. For example, in "Pineapple." He refuses the advances of a woman in a Stop 'n' Shop who seductively asks him how to choose a pineapple best for eating right away. Before walking away, he smells "another world on her, / the scent I'd want to breathe and eat too much / the way we do."

     After the Others lauds the passing of gift of story as brave, and urges poets to speak the world they see and hope to see. Weigl's goal as poet has been to separate himself from living selfishly and without feeling, but simultaneously to love our Eden and its inhabitants. He continually wrestles with the dilemma of how to live in the late twentieth century. Ultimately, the poems achieve an extraordinary clarity of purpose, and Weigl, who's received the Pushcart Prize, fellowships from Breadloaf and Yaddo, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, indeed is what Wallace Stevens defined as a poet: "un amoureux perpetuel of the world that he contemplates and thereby enriches."

     After the Others by Bruce Weigl. TriQuarterly Books, 1999. $13.95. ISBN 0-8101-5092-1.

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     Nicole Ross is a poetry candidate in the MFA program at Penn State University as well as a freelance writer. Her favorite poets are Rilke and Jon Anderson because they contend with themselves relentlessly.

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