Barrelhouse Reviews: Incantation by David Crews
Reviewed by Basia Wilson
Published in collaboration with Directangle Press / Fall 2022 / 24 pp / Link to purchase
Whether or not we realize it, readers expect a book to acknowledge the factuality of its making, its existence as an object, and even our existence as readers experiencing this object. But what happens when a book deprioritizes the reminders and guidelines we are so used to? And what might be the fruits of this reimagined reading experience? Behold Incantation, published by a New Hampshire artist-run letterpress, risograph printmaking studio, and artist residency. Quieting, remixing, or altogether stripping away several of the usual attributes that we expect of books, Incantation introduces itself by offering the reader a gentle immersion into its poetry. It invites her to saunter across the sand and straight into sea, to get rinsed in balletic rhythms and seamless polyvocality, with minimal attention paid to the facts of authorship and construction so as to maximize her focus on its poetry, its world, and what sings inside them both.
The Siren, John William Waterhouse
The poetry of Incantation glides along unmoored by page numbers. An afterword by Paul Genega, tucked into a flap in the back of the book, is printed separately on a loose leaf—rendering it, if a reader so desires, separable from the poetry. Although Genega describes Incantation as a sequence of eighteen poems in the afterword, the lack of poem titles offers a rewarding opportunity to instead (or also) read the sequence as a single long poem. The colophon collapses notes and acknowledgements into a single page. Relegating himself to the very back of his own chapbook, it is here that David Crews finally introduces himself. His name appears not on the title page nor the front cover. Instead, the cover features a delicate debossed engraving of The Siren, a painting by John William Waterhouse and Incantation’s center of gravity. (Put a pin in the word “delicate,” for later.) The Siren depicts a disheveled castaway in the water, neck-deep at the feet/fins of the alluring eponymous siren, who sits nude atop a rock with her lyre. In the painting, the mermaid gazes at the castaway who stares wide-eyed up at her. According to Incantation's meticulous ekphrasis, her gaze is not a look of nefarious lust for which the Sirens are so known, but a look of troubled love. Not unlike our castaway, Incantation fortuitously arrives in the reader’s hands as if washed ashore, polished and waterworn, its origins initially unclear yet captivating all the same.
The first poem is a gorgeous genesis that enacts incantation. In an entrancing chant, the speaker calls on light to come, and “magnolia blooms,” and “starlings / furious swift.” Yet with its “stilted truce” and its “hoosegow,” the poem is capacious enough to hold tension too. By skillfully building this sophisticated entryway into the work, Crews widens Incantation’s threshold and makes room for all of it, ushering the reader directly into the wavering, watery landscape that, in a subtle sort of palimpsest, he has imagined onto the original context of The Siren. Completed in 1900, The Siren, like other Pre-Raphaelite art, revives medieval affinities for the mythical by virtue of its title, style, and iconography. But Crews situates The Siren in a context that is unmistakably contemporary.
Ekphrasis is often an act of transliteration, transforming the nuances of visual art into poetry. When done well, this process awakens the reader to details overlooked in the artwork, and to language itself. But ekphrasis can also make space for reinterpretation and speculation. As early as the second poem, Crews makes the surprising and intelligent move of writing his way into The Siren. He imagines hearing “winds carry[ing] the songs of the last whales.” Suddenly, Incantation becomes more than a meditation on a century-old painting. It reflects our current reality, its changing climate, its disrupted habitats, and an imperiled future, full of potential for immense loss. Crews elaborates on this theme in another poem, both sonically lovely and unsettling:
when horizon
stretches endless
to humpback breach
in breath and water
the water deep
deep blue
when bowheads
never return when
hawksbills never
return when
waves cap bright
to petrel slide
in low groan
of tide and lion
become sea
when
So what does this mean for our lovers? Generous in its inclusion of both perspectives, Incantation embodies a love that frightens and fascinates—its luck simultaneously fine as thread and yet fortifying. Their individual lives are at stake: the castaway can only stay in the sea with the mermaid for so long, and the time the mermaid can spend outside of the sea is limited. Generally speaking, so much life is at stake too, though the castaway struggles to fathom the mermaid’s proximity to this truth. “I know there is / meddle in you,” he admits to her, but its extent cannot be fully realized. In another poem, Crews writes from the mermaid’s perspective: “(She holds / his face in her hands, / looks directly / into his eyes) / I get lost in you and forget myself / it is a letting go that both arouses / and fills me with dread.”
Regarding the mermaid’s struggle to fully love the castaway, Crews once explained during a reading that “the mermaid senses the world around her. This dying world where whales are dying, and baby loggerhead turtles are dying, and the oceans are rising.” Resisting the simplicity of the age-old binary that conflates women and femininity with nature, he said, “[The mermaid] doesn't care about all this because she's a woman… She actually carries this weight because she's part-fish.” She notices the rising waters, seemingly imperceptible to us, and hears “fissure, the sea opening voices / in the lilting current.” She lives alongside orcas, who surround her “as if dancing,” which Crews renders with such beauty: “heart beat flutter to breath inside the chest // and she did not touch them / and they did not touch her.” This lack of contact between the mermaid and orcas is significant, given the fervor and frequency with which she and the castaway touch. (After all, these are love poems.)
Eternal Spring, Auguste Rodin
Though she cannot stay, the mermaid still offers to “linger on the rocks” with the castaway, to “speak more words / of love, / fill the wetness of our mouths,” and to “bathe [him] / in the swift plume // of touch.” He holds her in return: “you in my arm / your mouth in my mouth.” However, Crews reminds us that more than lust sits at the heart of their encounters. In what is perhaps his most exciting ekphrastic leap, he not only imagines new narratives for Waterhouse’s mermaid and castaway, but relocates them to entirely different works of art, including Gustav Klimt’s Danaë as well as Auguste Rodin’s Eternal Spring, of which the castaway says, “I thought it would be larger / a small world shrouded in this embrace / of two lovers // Two lovers lost in the weight / of eternal spring.” The sculpture, modeled in 1884, depicts two seaside lovers in a nude tangle, kissing fiercely on a cliff. Some critics found Eternal Spring salacious, but Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin’s secretary at the time, came to his defense with the simple explanation that Rodin emphasized the “strongest points of contact between lovers, [working] by the light of the flame that flashes out from these points of contact.”
Such a method complements Incantation’s notion that more than what is carnal, the mermaid and the castaway seek something essential that buzzes in the space between their bodies, something alive that sings best the less space there is between them. This border between lovers falls away in the epigraph that precedes the sequence: a poem by Yosano Akiko in which the female speaker imagines whispering her lover’s poems into the lover’s own ears upon visits to her dreams. Echoing this epigraph, the mermaid confesses that the castaway visits her dreams, too: “you were there / behind me, your body nestled to mine.” In another poem, Crews invokes “Diving into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich (“I am she: I am he”), suggesting a coalescence that transcends sex and separation.
The mermaid and the castaway long for a shared interiority, to inhabit each other, to bridge the bright gap of the unsayable and untranslatable, and to remedy the rift that separates her being (her half-wild animalness) from his. Crews captures this with poignant brevity, making palpable “this chestache / of longing” when the castaway says to the mermaid, “if only I could hold your thoughts / the way I slide a hand to your hip, feel / the softness in your skin.” While some aspects of the mermaid remain elusive to the castaway, they both understand the precarity of their love, each other, and the world. To finally return to the word “delicate,” by the last third of the book it appears in nearly every poem, including in the mermaid’s bewildered admission that “it feels like this world / wants to destroy itself / then / there you are / This love so delicate, new.” The mermaid touches the castaway with tenderness, “the way one touches // some being that could die,” and though they are not enough, she fills “the wet hollow / of his chest” with “delicate words.”
Crews presents a mermaid and a castaway who recognize the fortuitousness of their love—a recognition bolstered by the frailty and unfortunate reality of the worlds they inhabit, which is really a single, shared world utterly broken up by ecological disaster. And while such dreariness, however real, creates a less-than-ideal backdrop for these lovers, the fluidity of the sea finds an equivalent in the fluidity of memory. In other words, Crews constructs a world (and subsequently, a love) that transcends time’s usual strictures. Despite this ostensibly being their first encounter, the castaway knows the mermaid’s touch because he “has felt it before,” and according to the mermaid, this is because “they say time / in the universe is not the same / as how we think of it.” Perhaps there is hope in the possibility of other timelines, other lives, that suture what separates these lovers. What is certain is that their presence ripples past the end of this impressive sequence, housed in a beautifully crafted book, with its intricate layering of art, myth, desire, and ecology.
Basia Wilson is a poet. She holds a BA in English with a concentration in creative writing from Temple University. A finalist for the 2022 Banyan Poetry Prize, her work has appeared in Philadelphia Stories, Platform Review, Voicemail Poems and bedfellows magazine. Selected for Moving Words 2023, Basia's work will soon be adapted for film in a national collaboration between writers, animators and filmmakers with ARTS By The People. She walks, wonders, observes and writes in South Jersey. Catch up with her at basiawilsonpoetry.com.