What We're Reading

Deniability

Author: George Witte
Publisher: Orchises
Paper $14.95 (91 P.)
ISBN: 9781932535198
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Reviewed by K.M. Jenks, Sales

In this second collection of poems from George Witte, the pace is fast, the images deliberately chopped and overlapped, and the language at the edge of raw. So it is a tribute to the considerable formal power of this poet that the effect is a focused, measured indictment of a government and a society that avoid responsibility by avoiding the truth. Witte's focus is not concentrated in the horrific physical reality of war, though his images of it haunt the reader. His reach extends to demonstrate the darkening of all aspects of life, public and private, that trails war like a pall. Perhaps because his own diction is so true, he has a special interest in how our speech is perverted, not only by design, but also by the weakening of our trust in each other. He includes in many of his poems catch phrases used daily to deflect responsibility for atrocity, and deconstructs their purpose, but the number of instances makes it feel as if he (and so all of us) may be swimming against a flood of lies. The resulting loss of faith that the truth can be heard, or even known, lets down social barriers against the demi-citizen Suspicious, who appears in several of the poems. His characteristics and interests personate the mood that thrives in an environment of uncertainty and fear. The worst aspect of this shadow figure is that it is by no means clear if Suspicious is officially assigned to watch his countrymen or has assumed that role for himself. Either take is intolerable.

"Deniability", the title poem of the collection, owes some of its darkness to contrast with lines from Keats, and gives us the observation our current state merits: "Truth's relative as beauty" and hammers home the point that what can now be gleaned from observing an urn is not, as Keats had it, more happy, happy love, but rather, "a priest receiving sacrificial girls with oil and fire…". Read against Witte's first work, The Apparitioners, which placed its hope in keeping faith, the outrage expressed in Deniability proves itself the right response. The poems, however, are not without light. Providing a contrast against which the fury shows best are quiet lines that yearn for moments of grace, lines that are themselves full of grace, such as these from "Soft Targets":

My daughter's voice beneath the din
Pipes up, unbidden as a bird's,
Her absence present in each word,
Like air where motes in sunlight glow
Alone, recombine as shadow.

From the artwork by Fernando Botero to the last line of "Soft Targets", this work shreds whatever cover might be raised around the status-quo by a national or a personal need not to look too closely, not to feel too much. It forces us to confront, rather than deny, the damage that continues to radiate from devastation we have sustained and from devastation we have inflicted.