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jmarkwindy's review against another edition
3.0
I'd rather watch you doing it
than do it myself.
I'd rather hear about it.
I want to be told.
I'd rather read about it.
I'd rather just sit here.
Hold the mask over my face
while you do it to me.
And so begins The Last Usable Hour. Landau's sophomore collection is anything but sophomoric. Its tonal structure is more decisive in its anonymity (the poems are untitled), more visceral, and dare I say better edited than her debut collection, Orchidelirium. It isn't necessarily a confident voice that speaks these poems, but an honest one in its insecurity, a voice that lies dormant in all of us and could belong to more than one speaker because it could in fact belong to anyone. Most of all, I feel as though I've completed these poems in a way by reading them, and that I was invited to participate with their deep devotion to the ephemeral, their oblique sadness and nihilism.
Throughout, Landau frequently takes familiar concepts and images and warps them to great effect, turning the safe and unassuming into the frightening and maddening. Early on, someone speaks:
I sleep beside the river.
The river often sleeps when I'm awake.
Sky, water, I have not had enough of you.
Better be shoving off again and into the night.
Can we really ever know anything for what it is? This troubling thought is felt deeply here, then shrugged off in the last line: "Oh well!" To me, these lines comment on anxiety, a theme that preoccupies the collection most successfully at the beginning. Later, a speaker offers some friendly advice:
You should find something definite to subscribe to
so as not to keep drifting tossed aimless through the world like this.
But the manic speakers in this collection suggest that if the world teaches us how to interpret it, we can only ever subscribe to the fleeting and unknowable. As this dialogue between steady and skeptical speakers continues, the whole experience begins to read like one conglomerate inner monologue complicated by a mind turning psychic corners, effectively worrying art into existence.
Unfortunately, sections two, three, and four pale in comparison. Here's one page from "Someone," the third section, in it's entirety:
dear someone
so strange to see you today
taking up more than your share
of space
we meet at the cafe
because you are waiting there
dear someone
where did you buy your scarf
do you like it
I do
These lines have a thin quality and don't quite rise to the same heights or engage with the same inquiry posed on the following page:
immaculate middle-of-the-night quiet
rainlessness
the late moony sadness
of the one specific mosquito
dear someone
you habituate me to the invisible
I exit through you not as myself
If not as yourself, then as whom? As an intimate and particular "someone," or a literal someone, so essentially anyone? As the reader? These lines contemplate the transferal of consciousness from one being to the next, and by extension its transfiguration. Into what and for whom, we can't really be sure (maybe because we can't ever really know a person, as the idea we're given in the first section would suggest), but it's an engaging question that serves as a critical takeaway.
The Last Usable Hour falters when it recycles the same language to assert the beauty of ambiguity. It excels in its insularity, especially when it introduces and extends the presence of desire as a way to complicate the inevitable void that plagues the human condition. My favorite lines from this collection help build this idea, and they echo the sexiness it begins with:
more is more
which is why
we perverse ourselves
into the many shapes we make
spared the separation
praise
the with-joy
your lower
between my
conjoined
open-necked
smutting in
and out of it
happy
have us all inside
If the title is of any indication, Landau's third collection, The Uses of the Body, hopefully develops ideas about the meaning of desire in a supposedly meaningless world even further.
seebrandyread's review
4.0
Today I read The Last Usable Hour by Deborah Landau. I love the way poetry stretches the limits and possibilities of language. It's not tethered by character, plot, and narrative the way prose is and can therefore focus on the individual word, punctuation mark, and physical space on the page. Landau's poetry considers all of these aspects.
The book is divided into 4 sections, each consistenting of a series of title-less poems. Many are addressed to an unnamed "you," and one section includes the phrase "dear someone" in nearly every poem. There's very little to anchor the poems except for this mysterious addressee, who may or may not be the same person throughout, and that the majority seem to take place in the city during the winter. As a result, the collection has a lonely feel.
The pages of the book are large, but the poems rarely take up a majority of the space. Few poems are more than a page long, some lines only a few words long. Since no individual poem has a title, a small asterisks marks the beginning of a new poem at the top of the page. Even though night imagery isn't especially common, the poems have the essence of taking place at night or maybe written in the night, the asterisks single stars, the poems the moon illuminating the open page.
I really found myself relying on senses and inference with these poems. I'm sure I could glean more concrete information if I analyzed each one, but I don't think this is the intent. I think the collection is about a relationship and a specific time in the poet's life, that, on the surface, seems pretty typical, but has been expressed with images, atmosphere, and impressions.
The book is divided into 4 sections, each consistenting of a series of title-less poems. Many are addressed to an unnamed "you," and one section includes the phrase "dear someone" in nearly every poem. There's very little to anchor the poems except for this mysterious addressee, who may or may not be the same person throughout, and that the majority seem to take place in the city during the winter. As a result, the collection has a lonely feel.
The pages of the book are large, but the poems rarely take up a majority of the space. Few poems are more than a page long, some lines only a few words long. Since no individual poem has a title, a small asterisks marks the beginning of a new poem at the top of the page. Even though night imagery isn't especially common, the poems have the essence of taking place at night or maybe written in the night, the asterisks single stars, the poems the moon illuminating the open page.
I really found myself relying on senses and inference with these poems. I'm sure I could glean more concrete information if I analyzed each one, but I don't think this is the intent. I think the collection is about a relationship and a specific time in the poet's life, that, on the surface, seems pretty typical, but has been expressed with images, atmosphere, and impressions.
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