Claire recommends Selected Poems by Dara Wier:
Dara Wier is a poet whose work transcends the evolving cycles of American poetry. This collection, her tenth, offers a cross-section of her poetry, and if you’re looking for an entry point into her work, Selected Poems is the book. In it, Wier doesn’t suppress a thing—we are met with the full force of her weirdness, poetry that explores an intensity of experience that is unpoliced, full of humor, longing, and human fragility.
Right off the bat, Wier is like a flirtatious alien showing us her tail. In the collection’s first poem, “She Has This Phantom Limb,” the lines lean into one another, tracking some kind of perverse logic that feels at once completely unnerving and completely right.
She paints the nails.
She oils the hand and thinks
it is moving
down some man’s back.
When I read these lines, I feel the hand down my own back. I feel the alluring, slightly sinister way that Wier doesn’t quite write about the phantom limb, but infuses the poem with the phantom limb’s aboutness. It is an uncanny feeling in truly great poems, when your brain can freely enter into their consciousness, feel their patterns of logic, yet come out of them asking “What was that about?” But of course, the answer can’t be tweezed out with reason; it must be felt. The poems in this collection make meaning out of feeling, associative leaps, the paradox of consciousness, its nightmares, and whimsy.
Wier’s poems are jam-packed with the stuff of this world, full of dog shows and toothaches and snowfields. They offer us a cigarette in the sunflower field. Wier’s poems have an eidetic quality of image; they pass through the mind like ghosts in drag, elegant and unexpected. They resist the nothingness of abstraction, even as they abstract, as in “Colorless Green Ideas”:
We think how difficult it is for nothing
to remain nothing. Everything resists it.
One of the beautiful things about a collection of selected poems such as this one is the variety of the poet’s work that it encompasses. In this collection, we encounter Wier at her most bizarre, her most hypnagogic, in poems that invite a kind of meaning making based on the logic of dreams. We also encounter poems resembling vignettes, telling stories from the natural world, though always just an arm’s length away from some kind of linguistic sorcery. Throughout the collection, there is Wier’s anchoring voice, with an eye for hilarity even amidst disaster, a voice which seems to possess a knowledge of ancient mysteries, even as it describes a fly in your soup. In my opinion, Dara Wier is an essential voice in American Poetry, and if you’re looking for a book of poetry that is altogether sincere in its exploration of the depths of human experience, in all of its absurdity, pleasure and pain, here is one I can highly recommend.