James Butler-Gruett Reviews Margaret Ross’s Saturday
What the poems in Margaret Ross’s new collection, Saturday, do best is churn. First one sees images of “scorpions in lucite,” then “Beige clouds in a greenish sky,” or women “pushing firewood in baby carriages.” A bedtime story turns to a cityscape, a trip to the movies washes in playground memories, or a family reunion dissolves into recollections of a tryst. In Ross’s work, as she put it in an interview, the “question of what feels proportionate—emotionally, ethically, actually—gets constantly recalibrated.” All this churning and recalibration seeks to replicate just how strange time feels now.
Saturday further complicates the considerations of time present in Ross’s 2015 debut collection, A Timeshare, which points out inconsistencies and paradoxes to talk speakers down from dread. “[I]f there’s such a thing as time at all,” the title poem observes, “I never saw it / move and if that’s so then what am I / afraid of?” Saturday moves away from these worries to piece together how different layers, separated and kneaded by time, construct our experiences. Who we are is how we’ve suffered, what we aim for, what we see. “Detach yourself from the suffering,” Ross’s speaker advises, to herself and to her readers. “But I want / to remember where I learned to do that.”
The suffering in Ross’s work doesn’t stem from uniquely harrowing traumas. She has not, like Shane McCrae, been kidnapped, is not, like Brian Turner, an Iraq War veteran, does not have first-hand access to the story of Iranian exiles like Solmaz Sharif. What we know about her life from her bio is a series of accomplishments—Iowa MFA, Stegner Fellow, sterling publications. What we know of her life from her poems is, though particular, quotidian. In a poem called “Socks,” wryly acknowledging her reader, she writes, “What is the most boring subject / possible?” Saturday’s poems concern a family reunion at the beach or teaching abroad or theater camp, poems with comically plain titles like “Spring” and “Love.” These become poetic through their treatment rather than their inherent drama.
Stylistically, her poems read as particularly careful and lineated prose: clear, often complete, sentences, mostly conventional punctuation, and always enjambed. The collection’s three sections recombine and refract her childhood memories, her time teaching in Beijing and at home, and her adult love life, but all these contain and interpenetrate the others. She drags the reader’s eye across line breaks, stanza breaks, and section breaks, treating these borders as permeable membranes through which ideas pass, boundaries whose only function is to show she’s crossed them. The language of Saturday is direct and clear, as is true of even her earliest work—her first poem in the New Yorker reads like a nursery rhyme, ends with a couplet, “But soon I fixed that! / I married my cat!” The writing doesn’t disguise superficiality with abstruseness. It uses words you’re not supposed to use in serious poems, like love and stars and happiness, words that can easily slip into the asinine in a less assured voice. The complexity of the ideas presented in the collection and the layers of thought make simple terms startling and clear.
To be sure, reflections on time aren’t new to poetry. Recently Eileen Myles, for instance, articulated in their book on creativity, For Now, some similar ideas. Regarding the origins of their own poems, Myles asserts that a writer has “to be able to roll in time itself […] like a dog likes to roll in dead fish at the beach.” Myles’s poetry, though vast and various, often focuses on the present and works best in the present tense (“I am a Kennedy. / And I await / your orders”), when Myles’s speakers can gather in everything in the vicinity. Live, Myles reads like they’re in a New York hurry, sounds as if they’re composing the poems on the spot. Though Margaret Ross likewise “roll[s] in time,” she places everything—past, present, future—in the past tense. In a joke in “Stay” that goes under the radar, she even writes, “But this was / the present.” She closes the collection’s opening poem, “Macho,” with the line, “I thought that way for years.” Saturday constantly distances and adjusts frames, shifting the reader’s focus like an optometrist’s phoropter. And at her own readings, Ross gazes off into the middle distance, wide blue eyes glazed and oracular. She memorizes her poems to access them live the way they’re written, in recollection of various pasts. Ross’s pasts can be multiple lengths, as recent or as distant as she can reach, all in constant calibration.
This constant calibration rescues the poems from the expected. Ross evades cliché by sliding her moments of sincerity into poems so abruptly they feel like nonsequiturs. In a poem about driving up a cliffside, she writes, “Everyone knows a beautiful view / from a vertiginous place / solves certain problems / in the brain. It convinces me / I love you.” In “Macho,” when the speaker watches a small dog thrown into a pile of leaves and argues with her boyfriend about it, she confesses to “only / feeling I was myself / when I resisted things.” A restaurant scene in “Ceremony” dissolves into the speaker’s skeptical musing, “Many people / think people are getting smarter, freer.” In a poetics so drenched in its past, the idea of progress refutes itself.
Still, freshness wafts from the inversion of the collection’s imagery, which sees objects as people and nature like objects. “The wine opener was a silver person,” she writes in “Greenish Picture,” “who could raise her arms in despair.” In “Evolution” a butterfly’s wing appears “like fire / pouring through a lattice.” In “Birthday,” a dawn is “a vaporous pink stain along the hem / of the shower curtain.” Stars in “Big Purple Peonies” glisten not like flames but like “white rhinestones glued onto the rayon.” Such keenness of comparison links the quotidian, the world of objects, and the ethereal, the world of nature, in just the way she links one stanza to another and the past to the present.
Despite the freshness of their rendering, the experiences themselves are not. Ross’s poems describe experiences the speaker’s always had, ones she’s repeating, ones she’s reliving or can’t remember beginning. Though the train ride to her mother’s house in “Big Purple Peonies” is detailed, the speaker confesses, “Everything / looks the same.” When the speaker of “Orange Tree” names the flowers she sees at a nursery, it’s because she knows them already from fiction. Even the ocean, in other literature a symbol of constant renewal, is in “Thursday,” “another sky, but wrinkled, / secondhand.” In a self-reflexive moment, one teacher explains to her students the exact problem Ross is solving: how to write about love. The clichés come not from the feeling itself but from previous ways in which “love gets described,” how too much touch makes it dull. Ross is reaching in her language for the true nature, the cool side of what she feels, or as she puts it, “Trying to get down under the immortal dailiness / and touch the myth beneath the fiction.”
In their layering of time, Saturday’s poems replicate the strange state of mediation present in contemporary culture, in which claimed novelty feels familiar, all saturated with a persistent sense of echoing, of retro and references, of reboots and remakes chipmunked and sampled. Everything we see is served to us for the second time. Because of this, and because she’s the right age, a child in 1991, I’m tempted to connect her work to the much-discussed Millennial nostalgia, seen in a recent spate of indie films—I Saw the TV Glow, Eighth Grade, Mid90s—and it does have similarities. The homeyness and warmth of her poems are of a piece with those aesthetics, particularly when she writes of herself as a child or describes a journey home as a “feeling of prolonged withdrawal.”
Maybe the Millennial nostalgist in Ross is itself a reboot of the Romantic. Reading the work, one can’t help but reach for this label, given Ross’s preoccupation with memory and childhood, how she holds memories at a distance and interleaves them with her current experiences, triggering memories through sensory input. In “Optimism,” a speaker imagines the pain of a turtle she’s watching, which leads her to summon a memory of her father telling her, “It doesn’t hurt,” after cutting his heel on a seashell. In “Reunion,” a family group picture at the beach triggers a memory of “Last year,” when “whatever I was doing / on the beach, I was thinking / about a man.” Yet she winks at and complicates these comparisons in “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” in which a student turns in a copy of “The Tyger” and claims that she wrote it. Hers is a misattributed Romanticism, secondhand and misperceived. The first book that she loves, Ross’s speaker confesses in “Greenish Picture,” she loves because its “cover / seemed romantic,” though it’s really a “manual / for natural pesticides.”
Unlike a Romantic poem, Ross’s poems don’t establish a firm present to return to. The present for Romantics is a backstop to the memories, and the space from which emotion is “recollected in tranquility” is stable and finite. Saturday’s present is ever-shifting, a collage of nostalgia and anxiety. When the speaker of “Songs of Innocence and Experience” finishes her teaching for the day, she “walk[s] out / into dry leaves, leaves / up to my calves,” back to the memory of the dog argument from “Macho”—or was that in the future? Which occurs before which? The claimed goal of a Ross poem, as relayed in “Account,” is “To see my life now in reverse, to see it clearer.” Yet it is a goal her speakers cannot directly achieve. In “New York,” what seems at first to be a memory is revealed to be a story told to a child, maybe a younger sister. But as soon as the story ends, the edges dissolve, the cityscape takes life, and we’re alone before a windowless building. Is this a story? Is it the speaker’s reality? Is it the present? And “Where,” the poem asks, “did all the people go?” The poem can’t tell anymore than we can, and it can hardly show. “Such things can’t be drawn by outline,” Ross writes. “Smudging is more precise.”