Facing the Black-Winged Angel

William Carlos Williams famously wrote, "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack of what is found there." Cities of Flesh and the Dead, the remarkable third collection from longtime Scene contributor Diann Blakely, goes that idea one better. These poems, many of them tributes to friends and mentors who have died, fearlessly convey the news itself—or, as she puts it, "[t]he fallen raptures of this murderous world,"—and in the process offer us "another chance for transport."

As the title suggests, Cities of Flesh and the Dead isn't afraid of addressing loss or fear or violence. The very first poem, "Bad Blood," begins, "A woman stares, wild-eyed from the terror known only when death, / That black-winged angel, / Appears without warning." The section ends with a pair of narratives, "Memphis Blues" and "On the Border," whose plots feature murder. In between are poems concerning an unstable uncle who "winks at me and twirls the carving knife"; a priest who calls Mary Magdalene a slut; a speaker "alert / for snakes"; and a roadblock in terror-plagued Northern Ireland, where the speaker is "Glad though half-ashamed of the minor surge of fear." There's also an astonishing sequence of dramatic monologues in the voice of the prostitute Mary Jane Kelly, spoken just before she becomes the final victim of Jack the Ripper. And that's just the first section of the book.

The second section's equally fierce. It begins with a sonnet sequence dedicated to the late poet Lynda Hull, Blakely's close friend and mentor who died in a car crash at 40. In "Itinerary," the speaker asks,

What's 'mid-life' when every long-distance call

And letter seem to shriek sad news or loss—

Abortion, cancer, AIDS, divorce; a car crash

That locks me sobbing in school bathroom stalls

Several times a week, though my colleagues

Grow less patient with each new month of tears;

Another friend's psychosis, one's eyes scarred

Near blindness—and some not even thirty?

There is anger in that passage, as well as bewilderment and pain, but most striking is the sorrow that refuses to disappear politely, even when it inconveniences others. Later in the sequence, she recognizes unfamiliar landmarks in a place she's never been before: "I know this place somehow—from another life? / From your Chinatown poems, my sweet gone friend." But Blakely's nod here to the consoling power of art—Hull's "Chinatown poems"—gets undercut by the very next poem, "Woman #5, #18, and #21." The speaker spends a rainy afternoon inside the Soho Guggenheim, finally concluding that art is no "well of sympathy."

And it's true: The poems in Cities of Flesh and the Dead have little interest in showing what a sympathetic person their author is, or, for that matter, how sympathetic people in general are. The poet Elaine Equi, in an essay called "The Dirty Poems of Frank O'Hara," writes, "I have always found the idea that poetry should be uplifting a depressing one." Blakely would agree wholeheartedly.

But uplift is a different matter than redemption. "Uplift" connotes the temporary, sentimental feeling inspired by pop songs or Hallmark cards; redemption is about being set free. In both secular and religious frameworks, redemption comes from the process of confronting, wrestling and finally coming to terms with the truth that we die. Friends die, family members die, whole generations die. That truth is likely why we make art in the first place. Death is a fact too cruel to bear unless we leave behind some kind of beauty or order: a child, a poem, a thriving city. In summoning them so often, Blakely looks to her dead friends and mentors for affirmation of this understanding. Cities of Flesh and the Dead, then, is about the serious business of redemption, leaving "uplift" for the faint of heart.

The final section of Cities starts with the stunning poem "Before the Flood: A Solo from New Orleans." The poem is a kind of microcosm of the entire book. It begins with a "vertiginous" speaker crossing Lake Ponchartrain in her car, the bridge beneath her seeming to sway. With "homelife closing in," she's taken off for New Orleans, hoping for a breath of fresh air. Almost immediately, however, the stifling heat is "swathing the smelly narrow streets," and she's told, when she stops for directions, that it's too dangerous to go out at night alone. Even in the daytime, she's wary, encountering strippers, beggars and drug dealers. But by the end of the poem, thanks in large part to an encounter with a young mother who, while "balancing a cherub-cheeked, / Drooling baby dealt / Tarot cards and told my life story," the speaker has been emotionally and psychically changed. As she drives homeward, toward the bridge that suddenly "looked / More solid, somehow," she stops near a graveyard:

... I pulled over, seeing a procession circle

Raised white tombs then stop,

Jewelling one with flowers, and I joined a woman who opened

Her throat to echo

And to celebrate loss in that city of flesh and the dead.

Blakely's phenomenal book reminds us that every city is a city of flesh and the dead. We write the present onto the past. We make babies and poems; our cities thrive. We open our throats to echo. We celebrate.