[Note: I recently com­pleted a passel of reviews for a pub­li­ca­tion that decided not to pub­lish them. Rather than let them die on the vine, I thought I'd throw a few them up here over the next couple of days. The second and third in the series are here and here.]

Paul Guest, My Index of Slightly Hor­ri­fy­ing Knowl­edge

Poetry about the extra­or­di­nary suf­fer­ing of its author presents its read­ers with a spe­cial conun­drum. On the one hand we don’t want to pre­tend that the suf­fer­ing is inci­den­tal to the art; one of the more easily dis­pens­able things that T.S. Eliot ever wrote was that “the more per­fect the artist, the more com­pletely sep­a­rate in him will be the man who suf­fers and the mind which cre­ates.” But to err in the other direction—to read the suf­fer­ing instead of the art—well, that’s what Oprah’s for.

A reader comes wary, then, to a book like Paul Guest’s My Index of Slightly Hor­ri­fy­ing Knowl­edge. It’s not just the title: already on back cover of the book we find no fewer than three Poets Lau­re­ate warn­ing us about the “irre­versible, immense” qual­ity of Guest’s suf­fer­ing, which the jacket flap spec­i­fies: “At the age of twelve, Paul Guest suf­fered a bicy­cle acci­dent that left him par­a­lyzed for life.” Nor is this a publisher’s ploy to secure our pity in advance; the end of the first poem, “A User’s Guide to Phys­i­cal Debil­i­ta­tion,” offers a fair precis of what’s to come:

It is our hope that this guide
will be a valu­able resource
during this long stretch of bore­dom and dread
and that it may be of some help,
how­ever small, to cope with your new life
and the grad­ual, bit­ter­sweet loss
of every God damned thing you ever loved.

For­tu­nately, Guest spares us our scru­ples, and he does so in the most dif­fi­cult way pos­si­ble: he makes art that is ade­quate to his suf­fer­ing. By turns funny, sharp, angry, and sad, his poems compel us to trust their candor:

There are days I want
to lament broken glass
or put my fist through the door
or throt­tle the blue sky’s silent
throat.
—From “My Arms”

I tried to think of a world
in which wisdom was optional
but that world had thought of me first.
—From “My Luck”

The best evi­dence that what’s good about My Index is its craft and not the cir­cum­stances of its com­po­si­tion comes from Guest’s own oeuvre. Con­sider the clos­ing stan­zas from “The Intru­sion of Ovid,” a poem from his first book, 2002’s The Res­ur­rec­tion of the Body and the Ruin of the World:

You, your­self, tram­ple
the sad­ness I lushly tend like a garden
and tell me to come in from the rain,

to laugh while I can, to get more sleep,
good advices all, and at this window
in which is framed the world that’s mine

and once was yours, I’m inclined to listen,
to put you down and shut my eyes
because pain is ancient, and there­fore classic,

as you are and I am not.

As finely appointed as these lines want to be, let’s face it: this is lyric in rags. Know­ing that Guest is par­a­lyzed doesn’t improve the melan­choly of a sad­ness tended and tram­pled, the self-​pitying plea to “laugh while I can,” or the cloy­ing apos­tro­phe to ancient authority.

My Index, by con­trast, shows a poet who has found a lan­guage appro­pri­ate to his har­row­ing expe­ri­ence. In place of that tone of cre­pus­cu­lar weari­ness, which has been luring sad young lit­er­ary men since “Prufrock,” Guest gives us this:

I was young and needed the porn but not
the money or the long sea­sons
of shame or what­ever was the burn­ing
sen­sa­tion I felt in my head
—From “My Past”

Like­wise, he’s put the “ancient” “clas­sic” Ovid to rest, a move that allows him to chan­nel voices closer to home:

There were secret meth­ods
and proven tech­niques
and when I closed my eyes
it sounded like birth con­trol from an alter­nate dimen­sion.
Sup­plies were low.
I had to order now
but I never did,
let­ting the night run out
like the spe­cial offer each one was.
While we made love
in a frozen world, oper­a­tors were stand­ing by.

Best of all, Guest sheds much of the sen­ti­men­tal­ity that freighted even his most recent book, Notes for My Body Double, in which he could still write of “stop­ping in a clear­ing of clouds / and canopy to note moon / like milk on my skin.” Com­pare those lines to a sec­tion of “A Long Time I’ve Wanted to Say Some­thing,” from My Index. Though the poem includes a cou­plet that might, in another con­text, seem all awash in an ether of tepid plangency—

O world, I want to love you
better than I do, forgiving

—it quickly recov­ers and hones its edge, resolv­ing into a wholly unex­pected and imme­di­ate image:

every satel­lite dish bolted to the roof
and pointed towards the
ubiq­uity of the sky,
and all it holds within it like a gravid cloud—
dark­ness first of all
and then the post-​mortem flare of the stars,
and fixed between both,
satel­lites soak­ing our cells
with beamed, invis­i­ble pornog­ra­phy
and all its stark frus­tra­tions,
its spacey cou­pling, its the­ater of vicious hunger.
How many times have I gone
home through that rain,
my body per­fo­rated by
waves of strange ecstasy?

The scraps of poet­i­cism that remain in these lines—the unnec­es­sary grandil­o­quence of ubiq­uity and gravid, the pro­gres­sively ener­vat­ing stark frus­tra­tions, spacey cou­pling, and vicious hunger—shouldn’t dis­tract us from the mar­velously spooky image at their heart. “Satel­lites soak­ing our cells / with beamed, invis­i­ble pornog­ra­phy”: yes, we say, that’s our world, that’s the one.

One of the most impres­sive things about My Index—and I say this with gen­uine admiration—is that Guest lets him­self be a real son of a bitch. Play­ing the ass­hole serves him well on a number of levels: it adds to the air of hon­esty, yes, but it also acts as a pro­phy­laxis to our pity and, per­haps most impor­tantly, it gives him space to be funny. Guest can do many voices in this reg­is­ter. In “My Arms” he does sad, subtle scorn (think Robert Hass, after a fight with his wife):

Untrue to say I lost count
of what I never hoped to keep.
A lie to say that when
she held my hands to her hips
and her body above mine,
I loved such need, I did not hate us both.

“Eulogy” gives us affect-​flat stand-​up (think Billy Collins, after a fight with Gar­ri­son Keillor):

But it was his time, we should all admit.
Shouldn’t we, who loved him
the way we love traf­fic
and cell phones during spec­tac­u­lar sex
and the degra­da­tions of puberty,
shouldn’t we all feel
as though light were swelling within us,
inflam­ing us?
—From “Eulogy”

And, with “Semi-​Apocalyptic R.S.V.P. with Con­tin­gen­cies,” Guest proves he can con­jure enough acid-​soaked spite to power the devil’s own Prius (think Fred­er­ick Seidel, after breakfast):

assum­ing wit­nesses dredged
from the quarry’s alka­line depths
don’t recover well enough to recall
their bad luck that night in May
when I was bowl­ing with my lupus-​stricken mother
after record­ing the pro­gres­sion of her grotesque defor­mi­ties,
an activ­ity which pleased her
for as long as Sci­ence still con­sid­ered her human
……………………………..
then I would be very glad to attend
the white wed­ding of your ass-​faced daughter.

I doubt even Guest would con­sider those last lines to be great poetry, but they sug­gest why My Index makes for such a refresh­ing read. I can think of many young poets who might make room for the phrase “ass-​faced daugh­ter” in their work, but they’d swad­dle it in layers of irony, making sure that we knew that they knew how hate­ful it was to say. Guest, how­ever, lets that morsel of sopho­moric bile poison his speaker’s own mouth. In other poems lust, shame, anger, and humil­i­a­tion come in for sim­i­lar treat­ment, and the result is an emo­tional panorama the likes of which have rarely been seen since John Berryman.

To call Guest’s poetry con­fes­sional will likely do it more harm than good, but in its own spiffed-​up post-​Ashberian way, that’s what it is. While Guest doesn’t yet have the tech­ni­cal mas­tery of the best prac­ti­tion­ers of the mode—his ear some­times runs flat and he tends to overdo the adjectives—his affec­tive range and his talent for rhetor­i­cal candor put him up there with Frank Bidart and Carl Phillips in his abil­ity to create an art of real emo­tional power.