Capricorn, Venus Descendant: 50 Poems of Pandemos, Karkinos, & Eros by Michael Joyce, and: Light in Its Common Place by Michael Joyce (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Capricorn, Venus Descendant: 50 Poems of Pandemos, Karkinos, & Eros by Michael Joyce, and: Light in Its Common Place by Michael Joyce Daniel T. O'Hara (bio) CAPRICORN, VENUS DESCENDANT: 50 POEMS OF PANDEMOS, KARKINOS, & EROS Michael Joyce Broadstone Books https://www.broadstonebooks.com/shop/p/capricorn-venus-descendant-50-poems-of-pandemos-karkinos-eros 64 pages; Print, $22.50 LIGHT IN ITS COMMON PLACE Michael Joyce Broadstone Books https://www.broadstonebooks.com/shop/p/light-in-its-common-place-poems-by-michael-joyce 96 pages; Print, $22.50 In recent psychoanalytic theory, when revisiting Freud's later speculations on the death drive, the idea of unbinding the tangled bundles of erotic and destructive, even self-destructive impulses (and their memories and fantasies), is a way of talking about what happens in the cases of patients who succumb to their suicidal compulsions. When untangled by analysis, unbound by it, unless there is an object readily available toward which those destructive (or erotic) feelings can be directed, they turn immediately around on the self, with, in the former cases, too often tragic results. Imagine, if you will, the famous fort/da game invented by Freud's grandson Ernst for the times when his mother, Sophia, leaves him alone. Ernst in his crib ties a string to a toy and throws it over the side and reels it back in, saying as he does so what sounds like fort (there) and da (here). For a poet, disinvestment, unbinding impulses of an erotic or a destructive kind, can be a dangerous, delicate process. This is not to claim that Ernst ties the string [End Page 128] around his neck, changes the toy at its end to a heavy weight, and hangs himself in his crib, rather than suffer the periodic losses of his mother's presence. But as Olivia Laing, in The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (2013), outlines it usefully in her chapter on John Berryman, his disinvestment in his parents, especially his father, informs and shapes his alcoholism definitively throughout his life, sacrificing himself even as his poetry rises to major status, especially in his personal epic, The Dream Songs (1969). Rossella Valdre's Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Freudian Death Drive: In Theory, the Clinic, and Art (2019) is the best guide to this recent theoretic development, which I single out as I find it most useful in reading the poems in Michael Joyce's both important and subtly disturbing volumes. Two poems, one from each of these volumes, can exemplify what I mean. "North Wildwood" is the first poem, from Light in Its Common Place. It adopts the commonplace tone of this volume, and its run-on syntax is typical of Joyce as it paints a beach scene at two a.m. of three brothers observing "a lone crane," feeding "amidst lapping waves," as "false dawn traces a horizon beyond the blackness." The brothers, as they move along the boardwalk under the "bright wand" of the lighthouse, fall silent and disturb two lovers who are whispering "beneath a dark arbor." The third and final stanza is haunting, despite the simplicity; indeed, the commonplace nature of scene, language, and subtly haunting import disenchants similar, more spectacular ocean-side visions, such as Stevens's from "The Idea of Order at Key West" or Whitman's various sublime seaside revelations: On the porch of the rental house they lingermulling over questions that have no answersbut all of which reduce to variations uponwhat will become of our children and of us.Somewhere across town there is a sirenand though the Perseids are at their height,there are no falling stars that they can see. The summer meteor shower does not even give the speaker or us a symbolic representation of tragedy, either to come or ever. There is no referenced, even imaginary object that rises to the heights, even if to fall, only in the distance some ordinary siren in the middle of the night "across town." The worry of [End Page 129] fathers for children and for themselves pervades the poem with a diffuse, expanding malaise, that of inescapable commonplace death. The death of loving...