If someone asked, I might say that Anna Bat-Chai Wrobel is a political poet, or maybe a witness poet.  But then again, I might not say either, afraid I’d unfairly stereotype her for prospective readers of The Arrangement of Things.  Still, if you’ve heard of Auschwitz, Kristallnacht, Anna Akhmatova, Yishuv, or Brooklyn, or if you’ve read a novel set in Germany titled “Every Man Dies Alone,” I think she’s your kind of poet.  Maybe I’d say she’s a social justice poet: historian, teacher, daughter of a Polish Jew who fought with the Soviet Army during WWII, descendent of family members on both sides who were murdered at Treblinka. Certainly she’s a Jewish poet — a product of the diaspora, born in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx, who once described herself as a “nomad of the boroughs.”  

Knowing her history makes me particularly enjoy her poem “Sweeping the Screen Porch in December which concludes:

     good news
     bad news
     life and death in the balance …
     I sweep dry leaves and old seed
     from the cold screen porch
     not knowing what else to do.

I’ve pondered these lines after reading other poems in this volume, sensing in them a contentment the poet has not always experienced.  In “Phone Call” she tells about her father’s friend, “a man /not dead at Auschwitz” who passed away two days ago:

“I came to America to kill cockroaches,” he said.
“This is what life is.”
But better than killing men and being
called cockroach, rat and virus.

The poem details his struggle to make it in America (“Telling factory owner in the Bronx to go to hell”).  She says, “He is our living memory.”

But being a Jewish poet is what makes Wrobel, in the final analysis, a human poet, and the kind of political poet who wouldn’t want to build a wall at the border.  Recently I heard her read “Mayan Girl (one)” subtitled “(Brooklyn subway /destination Port Authority).” She instantly feels a bond with this child:

     her father mine
     her full cheeks mine
     her lost-between languages
     inner speech mine

In the final stanza her voice seems defiant:

     bless the small
     child of migration —
     may New York City not crush you
     may you grow beyond
     the servitude assigned
     to your parents

She continues this expression of egalitarianism in the poem with my favorite title, “Of Greek Omelettes and Jewish Rye.”  This time she’s in Stage Door Deli and notices “Mayan and Aztec faces abounding” as the help reflects another diaspora:

     This is “el Norte” and for decades now
     the diner world has absorbed many
     thousands of “Indians” pushed from
     their lands, barely visible in ours

For this reader, these poems evoke both Whitman and Martín Espada, but Wrobel is also the type of person who recognizes those afflicted with the mundane bad luck of daily life.  Her poem “That Dollar” is about “the crusty girl /or skinny man” seen regularly standing at intersections with signs that remind us that anything helps. I sense she’s still thinking of these lost souls in “This Close,” where she rejoices at being in a pastoral setting “while the masters of emptiness /swim secure in gold-plated / Nothing.”

Again, I want to avoid stereotyping this poet who must bear the “dilemma of memory.” There’s a poem about falling in love (“My Cagney”) and one titled “Senior Discount,” which shows social justice poetry can be funny (“I’ll be damned if I’ll hide my age / and forgo the ten percent”).  I laughed again at “On Pruning a Library,” when she asks, “So what should I do with the Freud?” She also has a funny poem about aesthetics titled “Cheap Seats,” which is where, she affirms, we can find “real poetry.”

Perhaps the thematic key to The Arrangement of Things is kindness and the world’s desperate need for it (the book’s title comes from the poem “a student’s gift.”  In “Commonwealth,” she writes:

     There is the peace
     that settles in the one
     who saves a life as
     the Talmud suggests
     the “world entire” may
     be joined to a deed.

One might say that the arrangement of things in this book is itself an act of kindness. This reviewer would also make the bold claim that readers of it might be reminded of their own capacity for kindness.  Brecht asked if there would be singing “in the dark times” and concluded “Yes, there will be singing. /About the dark times.”  Many of us in America think dark times are upon us now.  Those who feel the need for singing might want to read this book.

— Kevin Sweeney

Literary history is replete with writers who walked and who wrote about walking, from early pilgrimage accounts to contemporary records.  Cole Swensen tackles this voluminous history in a book of poems about many such writers, interspersed with prose poems regarding walks of her own.  The volume is organized loosely chronologically — beginning with Chaucer and ending with contemporary writers Iain Sinclair and Will Self — and it contains longer poetic sequences about the work of Rousseau, Thoreau, Sand, Woolf, Walser, Sebald, and poet Lisa Robertson. 

They represent only a small sampling of the writers touched on here, however, which  also include Wordsworth (Dorothy and William both), De Quincey, Dickens, Nirval, Humbolt, Muir, Breton, Debord, Burkhart, Herzog, Mullen, and more. 

The poems operate as micro-essays on the work and interests of each walking writer.  As in the longer poem, “Rousseau,” they frequently begin with a third-person description:

     For Rousseau walking     was a solitary breech     of a rift of sky
     drifting to a gate.  And the gate swung shut . . .

These seeming didactics break down as Swensen shifts to the first person, and her fractured syntax leads us to wander the lines searchingly — is this the named writer or the poet herself now speaking?  Regardless, the effect is one of a sort of breathless instructional:

                    . . . Turned around fast enough to make the trees run

     in the night, rather warm.  And why not go on?

     The first walk: the first line: that so alone am I who loved
          so is walking
     always walking toward.  I saw myself in shards.  The drift that drives     

     the eye into time. . . .

The relationship of the walked line to the written one is clear in many of the poems; breath plays a role, as does rhythm.  In “Rousseau,” the ways in which the hand makes a written line on the page are shown as akin to the walker’s passage across the landscape, and revealed through the rhythm and scrawl and “loping slant” of the body:

     Any walk     Rousseau once said     is endless where     the wild
          might seem
     to have a name undone from within     the unanswered f law
          written out

     by hand.  The entire text of what is now known as The
          Reveries of a Solitary Walker
     was found scrawled     and the hand goes on, has its own
          hundreds of miles to
     go.

Many writers have found the “wild” in themselves, and these revelations are exposed beautifully in the poems.  In particular, we learn from Swensen about Thoreau’s concept of wildness “as a door within most animate things.”  Thoreau used the word “wild,” she tells us, “not as an adjective but as an exile /sifting an estranged country through overhanging leaves.”  This leads us in further understanding, too, about being lost, and the wild becomes “a noun because it was /a sovereign, concrete thing, a thing you could hold, vastly alone, //into a moving part somewhere //in the body . . . ”

To hold the wild in the body is to find the vastness — and strangeness — of the self. George “Sand walked /as a way of painting a landscape in and of the mind outside.” This route for her, as for so many of these writers, is an ecstatic one, a place of abandon where broken open; “dissolved of body,” the walker becomes inseparable from the space and path she walks.  Distance is understood then to travel two directions, out into the world and deep into the self.  In Thoreau: “Walking,” “‘Difference and distance are one’ all our lives //to find ourselves surrounded by strangers if we have truly lived.”

To what end, this distance and estrangement?  “The myth of the wanderer is common to all cultures, the one who, never //quite placed, harbors.  To be lost is a stranger,” notes Swensen in Walser.  But to be lost and a stranger is also to be vulnerable, porous, open to exchange.  Replete with such exchanges, and the moments of shattering that make them, the poems of On Walking On navigate this boundary between self and the world. Shards break apart, ref lecting light; in ecstasy we step beside ourselves, undone, along with our understanding of what we see and know.  To be a stranger to the self requires receptivity, a condition that walking — and writing — perhaps encourages.  For Sand — and for Swensen — “holding the unraveling edge,” it seems such alterity is required of this life:

     It is my job to be a stranger, and I repeat the words
     “vast” and “immense” in order to remain so.

— Julie Poitras Santos