I received Ruth Danon’s Turn up the Heat: New Poems almost a year ago. When reading a book of poetry such as this, I invariably read each poem aloud multiple times before moving on to the next one. Then, after going through all the poems, I read and reread the book from beginning to end to see how the individual poems fit into the structure of the book. But I lost Turn up the Heat just when I was ready to begin writing about it. I searched everywhere I could imagine the book might be, but with no luck; then, several months after I had stopped actively looking for it, I stumbled upon it. What a relief, but more importantly, what a delight.
Although I still remembered the book fairly well when I found it, rereading it was a surprise. Each poem returned with a greater depth than I had remembered. I saw more clearly what the poems were doing, why they were doing it, and how each one contributed to the overall arc of the book. In other words, I was surprised by how greatly the book rewarded careful rereading.
The book has 58 poems on 79 numbered pages with a couple of pages of glosses about the book by other poets who know Danon’s work and a page of helpful notes at the end. The book is handsomely printed on high quality paper bound in attractive, glossy covers with overleaves front and back. The stitched binding is sturdy, having survived my multiple, somewhat aggressive, pencil-in-hand readings.
But what does Danon use her extraordinary skill to write about? A good place to begin is with the book’s title poem, “Turn Up the Heat,” the third poem in the book. The poem recounts, in the first person, a discussion between Danon and her husband about installing wood stoves to upgrade the heating of their upstate NY home. The poem discusses pros and cons of various options in mundane, rational, almost pedestrian, language, pregnant with subtext. Midway through the first stanza, the poem takes a slight turn with “Those who know me know / that I fear nothing more than I fear / cold. . .” Then, as the stanza closes, the turn sharpens with “My need is to avoid cold. My need / is not to be afraid of what I fear.” The second stanza begins abruptly, “Later we talked / about fear . . .” Now the poem bares its teeth, listing fears, all personal, and, therefore, universal. The poem ends with, “. . . In the hospital where / I spent too much time I begged / for warm blankets. Sometimes / they had them. Sometime not.” Notice how the final self-negation engenders uncertainty. Also notice how the careful use of punctuation adds ambiguity to the phrases. Throughout the book, punctuation is used to point phrases simultaneously in multiple directions to undermine, or at least delay, the reader’s, and the author’s, certainty,
While “Turn Up the Heat” features cold and fear, buried in the poem is the perfect rhyme, old / cold. While this connection may seem a stretch, or possibly even trivial, the connection is explicit in the book’s first poem, “Time Travel,” self-consciously written in short couplets to make the text appear a traditional tame poem. However, the poem’s tame appearance conflicts with the ragged harshness of the text, its enjambments, strong syncopations, torn rhythms, and more multidirectional phrases. “That first winter / / it snowed often and I was / already edging / / my way into being old.” Later, describing her hair, “. . . blonde // streaks woven into / my dyed brown hair. // I will let myself turn / silver and amazed.” This masterful poem continues with an incantational repetition of That winter, with multiple references to snow, old, cold and age, ending with “the place where I lived,” placing the poet’s life in the past.
The bridge connecting these two poems, is the book’s second poem, “The Frame,” a domestic two-paragraph prose poem beginning, “The machinery of the house isn’t working. The word ‘repair’ comes to mind. The dishwasher comes to mind. Something broke . . . I mean I broke off some small part of the machine, without ill intention. . .” This poem of desolation, possibly with an implied domestic subtext, concludes with a glimpse of predation and death.
This is a serious book by a serious poet who has shaped the individual poems to fit the overall purposes of the book. The book’s fourth poem, “Seeing or Interpreting” is a lively little parable illustrating the conundrum that reality is as much remembered as it is interpreted or constructed from the bits and pieces we apprehend, which is how many of these poems work. They present fragments for the reader, or the poet herself, to fit together into a coherence. Danon’s art is to provide sufficient fragments to create a whole that assembles into a satisfying structure that leads the understanding, or imagination, beyond what’s on the page.
This is well illustrated in the next poem, “The Temptation,” a slight (62-word) prose poem packed with devils, angels, lies, deception, deserts, deceit, claw hands, cloven feet, and so forth, that’s sufficiently coherent to let the reader know that something important is going on, but what? The poem ends completely unresolved with “It remains to be seen how tall my tales will get.” The next poem, with the reassuring title “Pastoral,” is a further misdirection. Instead of providing any clarity about reality, it conjures a pasture dotted with stones, or are they sheep, or it is possible to tell the difference if, as stones, they may move “Sliding over silt / After we stopped / Looking.” Reality remains up for grabs.
One of the principle focal points of the book is the next poem, “Against Nostalgia,” a numbered sequence of eight brief poems that is so unique, complex, and powerful that it feels like the armature giving the book its overall shape, unity, and structure. “Against Nostalgia” makes the preceding six poems appear, in retrospect, an introduction to the real business of the book. There is no space here to spell out what happens in the eight short poems comprising “Against Nostalgia,” but they introduce and juxtapose Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) and St. Anthony of Egypt (251-356 CE). These two individuals inform the entire book, including the six previous poems. They provide a lens to see how the elements of every poem articulate each other in the company of the other poems. To Danon’s great credit, the reader need not be a medieval scholar to see what’s going on, or to feel it; the reader merely needs to be alive, dealing with today’s sensibilities.
The reference to Giordano Bruno, certainly not a household name, points the reader back to the two epigraphs at the very beginning of the book, quotes from Bruno that deal with fire, light, creation, and self-immolation. Several of the “Against Nostalgia” poems evoke grotesque dreamlike imaginings of Bruno’s being burned alive at the stake in Rome as a heretic. The late Medieval, early Renaissance world provided a certainty indicted as a nostalgic brutality and repression, with a barbaric faith that ends “...twisted, bleached and white / as Bruno’s bright and brilliant bones.”
The other figure, St. Anthony, is a case of mistaken identity of almost cosmic proportions. Specifically, the poet had “. . . gambled / on the wrong saint. / I was betting on the saint / of beautiful lost things / from Padua when I / should have known / that it was the hermit / from the Egyptian desert / who tamed the devil / . . . that I should have / named my own.” This St. Anthony, also known as St. Anthony of the Desert, is associated with St. Anthony’s Fire, a terribly painful death from ergotism that was common through the Middle Ages in much of Europe. If you have a moment, Google Matthias Grunewaldl’s (1480-1528) Crucifixion panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece in the hospital of St. Anthony’s monastery. The reference to St Anthony of the Desert works backward to clarify the earlier poem, “The Temptation,” because of St. Anthony’s many repeated confrontations with the devil. St. Anthony’s and Bruno’s fire point back to “Turn Up the Heat,” to the poem and to the entire book.
The arc of this little book of 58 poems is immense. The poems maintain an amazing unity while braiding these images into our contemporary world, a world in which we know we don’t know what we know, and where we survive, as best we can, with our self-created fictions. The last poem of the book, “Verdict,” captures the sense that, where one thing after another betrays, as it inevitably will, “All your precious beauty does / no good in the court of dismay / . . . You make do /with what you have and who / you are. The light outside / the courtroom surprises you.”
At least the final image is light, she could have chosen otherwise. If you read poetry and can take the time to read carefully, this book is for you.