“I am only a howl of wind, / no one to make afraid, stay” (67). Self-awareness and emotional candor brim to the fore via discursive, hyper-focus on detail while resisting stylistic convention—these are not just Gillian Conoley’s literary antics, they are embodied both within and outside her formalized verses. She knows how she wants to be and completes this vision through her aesthetic collection. Gillian writes as Emily Dickinson instructed us to write: her collection is testimony to the complexity of the impulses behind each story of conduct. The most informative ones are those found in literature, biography, and history, while the more abstract tend to lack rationality as standalone guides. Notes from the Passenger examines modern society, with recurring images of family (children, parents), travelers (sperm) arbors, space, dust, and lovers—all of which are unreliable structures. Yet amid this instability, her defiant verses serve as a pillar amidst the rubble of a life rooted in presence, lived. Her surrounding objects both avail and counteravail, and her poems demonstrate a rhythmic and developing stability. The poems are intentional, volitional, and suggestive of inexhaustible meaning, sometimes symbolized by a crown, at other times something else. Conoley’s poetic otherworld is elevated into a higher reality through subtle verbal nuances that provide space for alternative interpretations, serving as a central function of her complex and unmistakable organization.
The poems’ speaker participates in experiences aspiring toward an aesthetic quality that thrives on contradiction and qualification, moving through images.
Periphrasis and indirection convey the essence of Conoley’s meaning rather than logical formulas or universal propositions. “[t]hese fits and starts get chalked” as she links her moments, rhyming within her own poetry’s themes. Her poetry expresses “the yearnings of thought and excursions of sympathy” by confronting complexities head-on in their interminability and particularity. The collection’s tensions, obliquities, and circumnavigations reflect the sheer difficulty of capturing the right description or image for what stands before us. The architectural imagery, like financial imagery of commensurability, reflects a denial of separate natures. Our Gillian structures moral life likened to solid, clean-lined buildings, white classical houses, and manicured gardens, contrasted with the ambiguous grays and complex shapes of “the grave kind of a farm waiting there in the shape of a strung-out guitar.” Through deliberation, akin to theatrical improvisation, the poems value flexibility, responsiveness, and openness to the external world: “slow motility in the unharvestable sea.” There is a subtle critique of collective behavior embedded in: “we people who cease to be useful” imbuing the work with a peculiar force. By challenging us to read tacit assumptions of sense-making and continuity, Conoley offers a liberal, social, and idiosyncratic take on craft. Her poetry almost never resolves into a final interpretation, as seen in lines like: “how do we separate / the next night from its screwed-in / light.”
Conoley’s work compels readers to reconsider moral claims. The speaker once viewed the father as the source of all moral authority, an infallible figure with whom nothing could be in conflict. By developing a vivid sense of their separateness, the speaker-guide recognizes qualitative individuality through “the concussions” of the father’s interests opposing with their sympathy by being represented as a figure whose needs demand justice, though any attempt to address them risks further harming the speaker, whose pity and pursuit of truthfulness threaten his control.
In addition to being a poet, Gillian Conoley is also a translator. She reflects on “the human propensity to discover and rediscover what was discovered” and explores the domestic’s myriad interpretations. As T.S. Eliot once wrote, “that perpetual slight alteration of language, perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations.” Her images, suffused with emotion, often emerge from nothing but fermenta cognitionis. Both thought and action unfold through movement, highlighting the inherent freedom. Goethe’s Faust dedication: “(Pain arises anew, lament repeats / Life’s labyrinthine, erring course.)”
The traveler’s implied awareness within Conoley’s work prepares the reader for the serious acceptance of the finely attended to and intended metaphors, which coolly dominate the collection. They call to my mind Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan: “Art’s a peculiar division of labors,” (from a poem in O-blek), his pledge to “Hand everything over to whomever…might use it.” and the latter’s: “The goods of the intellect are communal.” These poets found in the disused language of forgotten forms the throwaway lines of a friend’s letters, repurposing poems in artistic collaboration and exploring the erotics of friendship, which becomes the polemical affection for waste. By aligning with John Dewey, for whom art is a heightened form for people to interact with their environs by reimagining language as integration of art into lived experience in broader contexts, Gillian takes what they reckoned one step further as her speaker guides us through the Perpetua diary sequence as faithful attendant. She highlights the distinctions between original and second-hand experiences: “quotidian is the diary / ‘we understand it was to be a passion.'”
The last tercet of page 29 transitions from harrowing emotion to harmony, giving office to the institution of a felt quality. Her work is suffused with so much blue, culminating in a striking ending. “Who would be our gods were not the end but the octave” calling to my mind, “You are the music, while the music lasts.” Gillian Conoley frees the rain from its “lyric contract” with her ability to transcend conventional boundaries in poetry. She stuns via moral and emotional complexity and demonstrates a deep commitment to the surprises inherent in each experience of living.