A REVIEW OF TREE RIESENER'S EK (POEMS OF EKPHRASIS)

EK (Poems of Ekphrasis), the latest collection by Tree Riesener, is a bold series of ruminations on, pretty much, the last 2000 years or so of human history.  Being a skilled writer, Riesener ropes us in quickly and never lets go. The distant past is connected to the here and now by placing it front of the funhouse lens of 21^st century.  Rodin is found in these pages, and Breugel, and Chagall.  Christ, the Madonna, Queen Puabi – they all make appearances, as do the victims of Chernobyl, slasher films & fast food (and other assorted signposts of junk culture), junkies, the forgotten, the left behind – in short, the assorted detritus of the world we’ve taken it upon ourselves to destroy.

Needless to say, this is heavy writing.  These are important ideas dressed up in dazzling language.  Not beautiful language, necessarily, but hypnotic.  The imagery is relentless, as is the undercurrent – we are all caught here in a world quite possibly beyond salvation, and so where do we go now?

Again, though, it’s Riesener’s skill that keeps these poems getting preachy or overwhelming.  Quite the opposite, they fascinate and amaze, always shifting from one location, from one perspective, from one age, to another.  She jumps back and forth from the casually observational to the purely factual, from straight-ahead narrative to a beautiful Surrealist disregard for ordinary logic.  There are shorter poems scattered here and there that help us catch our breath, but the majority of these pieces are dense and allusive, thorny with anger, sorrow, mystery and hope.  They surround us, and we succumb.  Wry observations peer out of the thickets of language when we least expect them.  The almost-familiar darts behind the blatantly obscure and then reappears somewhere else.  The language can be quite playful but, on the whole, the driving force behind most of these poems seems to be a carefully controlled rage (and possibly even a sense if disgust).  How have we arrived in the present tense with so little to show for ourselves?  What’s left when the promise of unearned greatness turns out to be lie? 

Riesener doesn’t offer easy answers, she simply shows us where “being human” has brought us.  She’s an excellent guide who wisely refuses to play the part of prophet.  In EK, she hasn’t given us a map, but a mural, a mosaic of words.  Like any work of art that refuses to give up all of its secrets and truths at once, the frightening elegance of EK demands to be returned to again and again.

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