The synecdochic “unsun” of Andrew Zawacki’s new book, Unsun: f/11, interrogates the reach and validity of the poetic pastoral in an ecologically imperiled world. But this work owes less to the apocalyptic black suns, the Sol Niger, of artists like Robert Motherwell, Max Ernst, and Alexander Calder, and more to the grainy grisaille of the doors to Hieronymus Bosch’s famous wild and visionary triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, to Picasso’s Guernica, and to the black and white analogic photographs of any number of artists — including Zawacki himself, whose haptic, textured black and white photographs of an abandoned chicken coop compound, the camera’s aperture set at f/11, float among the poems and illuminate, in particular, a sequence of lyrics, “Waterfall Plot: After Wang Wei.”
As Mira Schor puts it in A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (Duke, 2010), grisaille has a dual legacy in realism and romanticism. “These graynesses,” she writes, “all share a containment of carnality, a stepping back from blood and flesh and death. If they all share a certain aspect of memorialization and marmoreality, it is nevertheless a reference to death that includes a poetics of presence.”
This mix of what black and white photography can afford -— an abstracted clarity, a non-committal, almost scientific exactness -— and a poetics of quotidian, somatic and semantic presence, has always characterized for me the poetry of Andrew Zawacki. His characteristic poems of lush restraint are made more urgent in this, his fifth book, in part by a series of fragmented sonnets for the speaker’s young daughter, who will most likely, after all, be the one of the two of them to witness what our current moment has wrought, environmentally, politically, otherwise. These daughter sonnets (“sonnensonnets”), which loosely book-end the collection, are as likely to contain M&Ms, stuffed animals, Pick-up-Sticks, and sippy cups as they are details from nano- and nuclear physics, thermal dynamics, digital technology, fractals, fracking, and loops of data surveillance, and these myriad realms of love and of imperilment are intrinsic in every poem:
Dixie Pixie Sonnet
Solar panel, a Fresnel lens
Five-pound bag of M&Ms and we could 3-D a clone of you
Pell-mell all hell and ill will will unfurl
If you don’t wear your cheap synthetic, frilly fuchsia princess dress
Fake glass high heel sequin slippers clacking on the tile
In your lifetime, the Arctic will have been
You’re a frog no you’re a frog (after eating ice cream, a fire hose for your face)
To conjugate in a future imperfect: will have been ongoing, once
Daughter you’re borderline pixilated, perhaps from the Swedish dialect pyske—‘fairy,’ ca. 1630—or Cornwall Celtic for ‘pixie-led’: confused, bewildered, unbalanced, astray; or an actress as stop-motion marionette, in animated films, altering her posture—like a flick book—frame by frame
Sound speed:
They are drilling it out of the ground to blacken the sun
Replete with neologisms, puns, sonic play, and an inimitable, multi-lingual “elastic grammar,” the poems in Unsun: f/11 range from the aforementioned sonnets to a performative and experiential sequence about earth and notions of gravitational self-attraction and ulterior destruction, “Roche Limit,” that comes as close as anything I’ve read to Susan Howe’s “Articulations of Sound Forms in Time,” as well as to an anthropocenic homage to a series of spare, war-weary landscape lyrics by Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei, accompanied by Zawacki’s oneiric photographs. One feels the strong presence of Charles Wright in these quartets. Here are two of them:
8.
Novocaine cold and a felon wind, a frailing of wet
November in the lungs. Passenger, customer, avatar :
Closer to the center there’ll be signs. A kink in the up-
cycled, pinwheeling dusk. A system is moving in.
15.
The windows someone watches a landscape from
are landscapes somebody else is looking at.
Heat map: under high-bay fluorescent factory
light, the night shift is rinsing NPEs and silk.
Zawacki’s Unsun: f/11 is an important book that joins the intrepid ecopoetries of writers ranging from John Clare, Henry David Thoreau, and Gary Snyder to Brian Teare, Brenda Hillman, Alice Oswald, and Jennifer Chang. “[A]n alarm [is] going off, and darkness / dropping,” Zawacki writes in “Study for Analemma 1,” “And cannot be undone.” Darkness is dropping, true. But as these poems attest, light mixes/fluxes/grisaille with the darkness: the light that is attention, vision, language. Even as old gestures of the pastoral must be reprised and revised, what is possible, if nothing else, is a singing of the undone. A subversive, un-naive, brave undoing of the unsun and the unsung.
[Published by Coach House Books on October 29, 2019, 112 pages, $17.95 paperback]