It’s always instructive, and sometimes exhilarating, to read an excellent poet’s work straight through, from promise to accomplishment. In Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems, for example, clusters of early work disclose whom she’s been reading. A volume by Dylan Thomas—or Roethke, or Auden—seems to lie close to hand; at times you picture the mentoring text on her lap, along with Roget’s. Then comes the alchemical change.

Chase Twichell’s Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New and Selected Poems, affords a similar pleasure, but with this twist: her early poetry, while allied to a period style, doesn’t feel like apprentice work. It’s not just that these poems are exceptionally well-made; acuity of vision—if not quite maturity—accompanies surety of craft. A key pleasure, then, in reading her work involves accompanying a poet who finds many ways to find her own way.

The poems in Twichell’s first book, Northern Spy (1981), most often composed in taut free verse, are restrained in tone and personal disclosures. The opening to “The Iris, That Sexual Flower,” its diction a tour-de-force of spare writing, is characteristic:

The iris, that sexual flower,

holds itself closed.

The florist’s bucket is blue

with closed flowers:

bunches of irises

wet with their sap

printing the eyes.

This writing treats its subject as both point of contemplation and figure for the observer, who “love[s] painting more than poetry,” as she writes in “Inland.” It’s not that these early poems aren’t passionate; they’re fervent about detachment.

They also exemplify Frost’s proposition that “the ear is the only true writer.” The prosody of Twichell’s poems rings true from the start. She adroitly orchestrates line, syntax, rhythm, and metrical ghosting in the first two stanzas of “Snow Light”:

I stop, winded, the air sifting down.

Here is the peculiar light I hoped for.

The branches of the pines are lobed with snow,

each shape intact, and brightened from within.

 

I walked among these flickering trunks in fall,

the grass grown stiff and noisy underfoot,

and found a mystery, a tree, a flowering quince,

all pale and fragrant, out of season.

Two tetrameter lines expand to four pentameters (or five, depending on how one hears the seventh line in the passage). Then the last line reprises tetrameter, an understated cadenza to the passage. She doesn’t repeat this pattern in subsequent stanzas. She doesn’t need to. Expertise has been announced; confidence—the writer’s and the reader’s—established. There’s equivalent authority in her layering of detail and abstraction—the fine zoom-in of “a mystery, a tree, a flowering quince,” for example.

Striking metaphors, freely formal verse as muscular as it is flexible, and self-possession bordering on austerity result in a debut of commandingly written lyric poems. Still, many are easier to wholly admire than to wholly love. Their sturdy shapes don’t embody emotion so much as contain ideas about emotion: “That’s me at the window, / wondering about love” (“A Mysterious Heart”). Self-irony is occasional and muted, as when she extends the logic of a bucolic fantasy in “This Was a Farm”: “All we have to do is stay. / Live here. Give up everything. / Never speak, or sleep.” These strictures aren’t weaknesses so much as self-imposed limits—most poets study what to elide before learning how much they can include. Nor do the poems lack conviction. They love “the thrill of thinking”—as she’ll say, from the vantage point of thirty years, in the wonderfully titled recent poem “How Zen Ruins Poets.” The philosophical poet she becomes is immanent in this early work: the gradually developing wit, capaciousness, and grit of her philosophy provide one of the chief delights of reading Horses from beginning to end.

Twichell’s fifteen selections from the thirty-two poems in The Odds (1986) bear strong sibling resemblances to those in Northern Spy, and consolidate the authority of her beginnings. Curiously, Horses excludes what most differentiates the second book from the first—three very long, digressive, multi-vocal narratives, one of which is the title poem, another a hilarious twelve-pager entitled “A Suckling Pig.” Maybe Copper Canyon imposed space limitations; maybe she thought them flawed. They are flawed, but they also show the poet testing her powers of invention. Leaving all of them out misrepresents a phase of her growth. I especially miss the cheekiness of “A Suckling Pig.” As we will see in her recent work, Twichell can be a very funny poet.

Still, in some of the lyrics from The Odds, the poet of “austere, remembered acres” (“Meteor Showers, August 1968”) loosens up and opens up. She moves in more dimensions, and moves us, most powerfully in “The Hotel du Nord.” After an establishing shot—boy in a white towel, lamps coming on, docked boat, the crickets’ soundtrack—the poem proceeds by lingering (lovely paradox) on the fragility of deep attachments, represented by the groups who stayed at the hotel at different times:

Others have stopped at a spot like this

to listen to a lake’s consoling messages.

Through decades of summers

their lowered voices abide,

filtered through the subsequent silences

of love withheld,

or the lies administered

to small ongoing arguments. . .

Along with her characteristic mastery of sound (stopped/spot/like/ listen/lake), management of time (have stopped/decades/abide/subsequent), and keen irony (lies as salve), Twichell takes love more personally:

We stood there too, in northern Wisconsin

in the steadiness of summer,

our children unborn,

our love for one another boundless. . .

In workshop-speak, the last line of this passage “risks” sentimentality. But given the storylines of the other visitors, from stilled consolation to persistent argument, readers know what the speaker will come to know: this couple won’t—can’t—escape analogous limits to their mutual adoration. It’s an extraordinary instance of context understating an overstatement. Then, in a kind of tonal mirror image, the poem’s most restrained statement—“I would not go back to see / the Hotel du Nord loom up again”—delivers enormous pathos precisely because of its reticence.

Tone is perhaps the most difficult of poetic effects to describe, and certainly among the most difficult to master. Twichell does so in Perdido (1991), the book that declares her full maturity. Among the fourteen poems she retains for Horses, three should represent this poet at her absolute best whenever such representation is needed: “Chanel No. 5,” “O Miami,” and “The Condom Tree”—that last title surely meant to make the eyes roll. What better way to rivet our skeptical attention as the poem unfolds its bizarre yet ineluctably associative logic? The premise: “sex makes lost things reappear.” The subsequent, mid-coital scene: “This afternoon when I shut my eyes / beneath his body’s heavy braille....” A flashback follows:

I fell through the rosy darkness

all the way back to my tenth year,

the year of the secret

place by the river

...

I looked up and there it was,

a young maple

still raw in early spring

and drooping pale

from every reachable branch

dozens of latex blooms.

The psychology here is as piquant as it is comic. One can’t help wondering how “he” would react to the speaker’s lyrical distractedness. The comedy, and the piquancy, continues. What “the older kids / had. . . hung there” is “beautiful first, then ugly afterword”—a mordant figure for sex, but as interestingly, a not-quite-analogy for the poem itself: beautiful; ugly; funny—its imagery as lovely/clammy as sex itself—and ultimately, indelibly affecting. In the last two lines of the poem, the lovers rise from “the damp present” of their lovemaking “into [their] separate pasts.” (“Chanel No. 5” is equally, differently, fine, as is “O Miami,” the sexiest poem I know of that includes a catfish pierced through the skull with an awl.)

As with Northern Spy and The Odds, The Ghost of Eden (1995) and The Snow Watcher (1998) function as siblings; this time, however, with contrasting features—the former exhibiting a predisposition for lankiness; the latter, for compactness. The Ghost of Eden inaugurates a new matter-of-factness, as in the beautiful “Animal Graves,” which opens with an immediacy that characterizes all the poems selected from this book:

The mower flipped it belly up,

a baby garter less than a foot long,

dull green with a single sharp

 

stripe of pale manila down its back,

same color as the underside,

which was cut in two places,

 

a loop of intestine poking out.

There’s a truth-in-advertising to this writing. Without explicit metaphors, precise detailing “sees” the dying snake acutely. Twichell adds in figurative imagery as “Animal Graves” develops its chronicle of “dead ones, wild and tame,” remembering how, as a child, she collected their remains for a “kingdom of the dead” in her yard. Finally, dogs carry off the child’s most prized relic, a deer’s skull, to bury it “in the larger graveyard of the world.” That sweeping prepositional metaphor is morally drawn but not moralizing because of the perfectly chosen “larger” instead of “large.”

Every poem in The Ghost of Eden bolts out of the starting gate, Twichell finding dazzlingly different ways to carry the reader along. And yet, for all their rhetorical exuberance, an ecological pessimism lies at the heart of these poems. Lesser poets of environmental angst—for whom the spread wings of every squashed bird connote Calvary—grab our lapels. Fully implicated in her “sin of despair / for the world my species has spoiled” (“The Ruiner of Lives”), Twichell never hectors. There’s always physics in her metaphysics, like the eponymous flower in “Touch-me-not,” which “flings the seeds in all directions,” if “you touch one of the tiny swollen pods.”

The poems in The Snow Watcher function much like koans—as Twichell, a longtime student of Zen, openly adapts its riddling insights. I like the book, especially its epigrammatic moments. As the book’s title suggests, however, there’s a lot of snow and a lot of watching. It’s a book of patience in practice. By contrast, the speaker in The Ghost of Eden mows lawns, drives, hikes, attends matinees and a cocktail party, shops for groceries, rides a train, and (unforgettably) encounters an example of unspeakable human cruelty at an animal pound: Twichell takes her brilliance with her wherever she goes. I simply prefer the poems in which she’s on the move.

Resonant, philosophical ease suffuses her work of the new century. Pages 167 through 253 of Horses proffer one astonishing poem after another. She is writing at “the height of her powers,” as the cliché goes. In fact, she’s writing at the depth, the width, of her powers. Every poem is necessary; few overlap in procedure. Rather than gripe about the excisions from Dog Language (2005), I offer up this passage from “Dangerous Playgrounds,” which begins by watching a “father... teaching his eight-year-old / to clean a grouse,” and then probes more deeply into the bird, as it were, than you’d ever have expected:

If you push on the bumpy

sole of a foot, the toes

wrap around your finger

like a baby’s hand. It’s a reflex.

He says clean, not gutas the other fathers do,

the organs slippery and ruby,

nothing soft, even the liver

rubbery, and the heart,

hard as an unripe cherry,

all of it smelling

like neither excrement nor sex,

but something in between.

Among the many realized events of language here, “slippery and ruby” appeals to the ear through internal rhyme, to the sense of touch through “slippery,” and to the eyes through “ruby.” We see feelingly the organs of the grouse. This writing is not “meditative”; it is meditation.

The poems in Dog Language move more fluidly than ever. Like her beloved rivers—the Ausable, the Boquet, the Opalescent—the poems gain speed at the rapids, slow down at the pools, pull in fresh currents from tributaries, or delta out into branches of association. Not exactly digressive or disjunctive, some of the most pleasurable poems devise cunning ways simply to get sidetracked: “Sorry, I’m quite distracted,” she admits in “Work Libido,” “A breeze from the next poem / has slipped into this one.” Plenty of poets do the post-modern strut; few side-step into insight as reliably as Twichell. It’s also in the recent work that the shrewdly funny poet fully emerges, as in her image of “the Buddha gleaming / like a vivid little sports car from his niche” (“Monastery Nights). Dog Language gathers so much force through its dispersions that deciding how to bring it to a close must have presented a challenge. She nails it with the most disarming conclusion to a poem, and a book, I can think of: “Well, that’s it. See you.”

The title of my review comes from “Sideshows,” a poem in the section of her latest work:

Do you sometimes suffer

a stab of insight into another’s sentience,

unwanted knowledge, unbidden,

both animal and human?

That unbidden knowledge insisting on empathy receives its most harrowing dramatization in nine carnivalesque poems that reveal, even as they conceal, a kaleidoscopic horror show. The settings shift among playing fields, boardwalks, kiddie parks, repulsively spelled amusement rides like Laff in the Dark—every one a crime scene. The cast of characters includes “the girl who liked to get high,” a girl “returned to her family unharmed,” and an indeterminate number of predatory men. Abuse takes place in darkrooms; under bleachers; on a carousel; and, most appallingly, in a house where a girl is perched on a mantelpiece for the best view. Excerpts can’t do justice to the vertigo induced by this cluster of poems. Rides and sideshow freaks; fairground stables; the scent of alcohol, aftershave, and piss—these and scores of other assaults on the senses flash and morph, like the alternately “fatso and skeleton” reflections in “Savin Rock,” the poem that initiates the sequence with full disclosure: “What I know is a slur of memory, / fantasy, research, pure invention . . . .” Throughout, the image of the centaur appears in different guises, linked to both the men and the girls. In the group’s last poem, “The Dark Rides,” it signifies the speaker’s divided mind:

She longs to know whatever it is

she keeps herself from knowing. Or rather,

the knowledge comes to her but she loses it

again among the small herd of centaurs

she keeps on her desk . . .

Of the poetry of recollected trauma, these nine poems are among the truest to the mind’s incapacity to precisely remember or precisely forget.

A subsequent suite of ruminations on language and consciousness doesn’t lessen in intensity. Rather, the exploration of the nonverbal medium of thought gains in urgency, because we’ve just looked into a prism of misremembered fact and made-up truth. “Things do not come in and out of being / in words. There are no words until after,” Twichell asserts in “Snakeskin.” Thirty years after “The Iris, That Sexual Flower” posited that “the tongue in the mouth / knows the blueprint, / the promise,” wary allegiance to language has escalated, in both ambivalence and eloquence. If the “mind / [can] never marry the words / it loved,” then silence has authority enough to shut one’s mouth—that is, unless one learns to speak for, not just of. Twichell has done so, sometimes writing as transparently as Milosz:

We should speak only of urgent things.

The earth was heaven once, and now it’s hell.

Since it’s already begun to embalm itself,

let’s assume that these are close to

our last words. That’s what I mean by urgent.

 

(“Negligent Worldicide”)

That we must preserve the life of the Earth we’ve probably already destroyed; what the mind, aloud or silently, assumes; the costly wages of love—these have been Twichell’s urgencies from the start. At first, she strove to efface the self, to perfect impersonal forms that “persevere intact.” Now, in the most literal sense, she is philosophical about the hard-wired subjectivity of human nature. It’s a philosophy requiring language as plainspoken as the “clopping [of] horses on the road” and agile enough to catch glimpses of the “one continuous decision” (oxymorons coming to her as naturally as snow to Buffalo). How good that her first name is Chase; she is among our most companionable seekers after new forms of realization.