According to the author, the poems in Jalousie—winner of Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize and Allyson Paty’s first full-length collection—were written over a span of ten years, yet they read all of a piece, cohesive and satisfying. As a reader, I felt transported back to my own years as a young woman in New York City, walking the streets sharply attuned to everything around me—or the book in my hands.
In “In Media Res,” Paty writes, “where to see is to have at a distance.” Throughout Jalousie, the speaker’s observing eye is struck by the particularity of things—low-slung mules, spilled rice in a gutter, a deli coffee cup—and to the way that seeing through a slant (the title poem “Jalousie” refers to a window treatment of angled, slatted blinds) changes experience. Paty doesn’t claim the things around her, making them part of her own narrative; instead, she often sees herself, almost bemusedly, at a distance as well: “I spoke/American English/was a woman/paid in dollars/forces continuous/around me/as space is/as air.” She allows herself to become part of the scene—“The upshot of a body/is I DISPLACE/The air itself”—and to be changed by it, rendered permeable. The title poem “Along The Grain” begins with the stunning line, “What a figure does to a landscape.” A figure changes a landscape and draws the eye, like a red poppy in a photograph of a mostly white ruin, but is also changed in turn: “skin LEAKS/the world comes IN.” “A tenderness to walk the fault lines/and slip oneself in.”
One of my favorite short poems, which speaks to this attention to particularity, is “Two Street Trees.” In it, the poet walks under a late-blooming locust into “ambient grape soda,” declaring, “It’s June. I’m in love with the reeking world.” The poem then leaps to: “I walk into October and wonder if by living/I have come to grasp negative dialectics/in a realm outside of thought./One yellow branch cuts the green ginkgo,/of itself and not.” That last line is pure pleasure, resisting synthesis or easy meaning.
Paty also turns this observing, distant eye inward—to what is being read (“I take in text/like water into bread”), dreamt, seen behind closed eyes (“the eyelids’ pink/and flickering wash”), or searched for online—and all becomes part of the larger scene. Another favorite poem is a long anaphora “Premise,” where each line begins with the word “Having.” The first two lines—“Having woken from the dream of riding on a flat tire/having carried the scrape and-a-one-two, scrape-and-a, scrape scrape onto the train”—launch a series of observations as the speaker walks to work: “Having surfaced in a heart of commerce, closed,” “Having passed two men caked in dust.” These observations lead to meditations on the men, the city’s architecture, and the history of New York, before the speaker “Having pulled the heavy institutional door/Having flashed ID to George,” arrives at her desk.
Each line moves between the mundane and the interior—eating yogurt, mulling over art, slipping into the workday. The poem spirals outward again when she recalls the two dust-covered men pretending to clean each other with leaf blowers: “Having slid tenderness inside a macho exchange,” she falls into an internet rabbit hole, searching for Bruegel’s Wedding Dance. That search sparks thoughts of Antwerp, rich Flemish merchants, the sugar trade, and the Reformation, tying back to her earlier reflections on Manhattan’s history. A moment later, pulled back by the thought “better get back,” she types in 1019 and ends up in the Met’s digital collection, landing on an image of the only item from that year—a single gold Iranian dinar. The office air suddenly feels heavier; the “skies have opened.” She considers “the rage of the gods,” despite “Having not once considered divine emotion as/Having shaped the observable world/Having inherited instead a humanism in which there are natural forces and people who act and/Having felt that view scrape and-a-scrape, metal rims, Having bent against road.”
In these poems, we feel/experience the view, with the speaker, and feel changed alongside her. And, per the final lines of the title poem “Jalousie,” we are reminded that we, too, can act upon the scene—able to “resolve the view, unstriped and entire.”