The History of Forgetting

May 18, 2009
Raab’s seventh outing pursues the same theme throughout, in tones as subdued as the subject is harrowing: the poems concern the end of everything—human life, humanity as a species, all that we can be or know or do. “A child dies, love fades, then friendship,/ and soon enough almost everything is gone,” says “Nothing There”; ”The God of Snow” concludes, regretfully, “that it had all started out so well.” Environmental destruction plays a role, too, in these pessimistic tableaux, which at their best recall Thomas Hardy: like Hardy’s, though, Raab’s sadness is finally personal and has something to do with advancing age. “The sea encourages me/ to think about the past,” he writes, “as if I could leave it where it is.” His free verse and restrained diction complement his conversational phrasing. There are glimmers of humor as well: “The life of the Japanese beetle/ is pointless and ugly.” Raab was a poet to watch in the 1970s, when his early, mildly surrealist collections drew extravagant praise: he has since settled down into quieter modes, the poems’ lack of sparkle offset—and then some—by the quality of pathos within their lines.

June 15, 2009
The poems in Raab's sixth collection (after "The Probable World") talk like John Donne in Billy Collins's clothing. He employs pop icons, movie madmen, and monsters to explore death, loss, and what it all means to be a planetary dot with immense nuclear capabilities spinning through a universe of dark matter, gases, and dust: "What once was vast/ will be small, what was endless/ will end." The poems probe the welter of forces that rush to fill the voids left by history and a culture all too good at forgetting. The pace is lackadaisical, as if you are strolling casually along with a friend, talking baseball or movies, and the friend suddenly turns and says, "I have two weeks." VERDICT Sometimes the insistence on plain language creates a rhythm that falls flatthe poems peter out, and the pattern becomes formulaicwhile others like "A Friend's Umbrella" (about Emerson), "Hawthorne on His Way Home," and "The God of Snow" refocus the metaphysical. The more personal poems are embedded throughout like code; here, too, something truly essential seems at stake. The result is satisfying reading for those interested in contemporary poetry.Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Univ. of California, Davis

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