John Beer

Laura Moriarty: Symmetry




The poem entitled "There Is No" appears slightly eccentrically, at page 54 of Laura Moriarty's 124-page book. In its entirety, it reads: "Lack of harmony / Between form and meaning / Symmetry." This poem seems initially an emblem for the entire collection, given its abstract, ars-poetica content and its mention of "symmetry," fractally replicating the name of the whole collection in the small. But "There Is No" is most representative of Symmetry in its simultaneous demand and refusal to serve as a representative. Like much of Moriarty's work, the poem's meaning oscillates, depending here upon one's interpretation of the title. Within the poem, the reader cannot be sure what relation between form and content is posited.

The entire book gives us form and content in harmony; a harmony founded not upon abstract statement, but upon accretion of particulars. As the book proceeds from its opening musings, Moriarty develops her meditations historically, almost geologically. Such painstaking labor provides an implicit counterpoint to the event haunting the book, the 1991 Gulf War. That war necessarily denigrated historical modes of thought in favor of CNN's mediated immediacy; members of the United States government had little to gain by emphasizing that events happen for reasons. Poems such as "Song":

There is a song
About repetition
There is a red sun
Incoming like a siren
Or the steady

All clear all wrong
That we see each other
Flatly
Long range

Life as in taking too much
Describes the weapons
The words blood

Friendly the boys
Among them fire

Us

secure for Symmetry a place in the too-small body of Gulf War literature.

Formally, Symmetry marries a longing for the eternal with the constant press of time. Moriarty invents a quasi-sonnet form of fifteen lines, all the instances of which are untitled. These poems, for example that beginning "The meter running," mirror the human wish for symmetry, also evident in particle physics, in their song-like rhythms and their repetitions in the ninth and final lines. At the same time, they break the sonnet form, signaling a recognition of the essential asymmetry of temporal experience. This recognition becomes still more explicit in the book's drive toward narrative, evident in the numerous sets of poems which form a series, and culminating in the extended prose series "Night." This conflict of desire and knowledge peaks in the poem "Plumas," to my mind the book's finest, ending:

A jar of wings.

Two clowns in a canoe.

A blackbird shaking the bright body. Black and blue.
Yellow.

Left shaking. Wings.

Black and white lake. Night.

My sleeping. Rented.

Seen from a chair in the corner.

Love.

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