Areas of Fog [Paperback]

Jospeh Massey's dad really tells it like it is on the other review Amazon has printed. This is a book to get your hands on while you can.

While Massey (Junior) is still young--he was born in 1978--he has already become almost an emblem of sorts for the poets of his generation, and for those a little older than him, like myself, who are still listening to the "rain slanting inside my coffee cup." In a way this is precisely a generational thing, for Massey seems to have listened himself, to the work of a certain range of insufficiently praised US poets, and some of his grit and determination seems to stem from his vow to them that their lessons will not be lost. Sometimes this can be scary, like Saul stricken on horseback on the way to Tarsus. It's not just tramping through old wet forests when you're Joe Massey, there's some educating to be done.

The work, which seems so awesomely attuned to landscape and nature, is also busy juggling behind the scenes a mass of poetry, poets, individual poems, and poetic attitudes, but Massey's skill is such that it all looks so effortless. He is always seeing things for the first time, and when that gets wearisome, he changes up and adopts a poetics of subtraction, of disappearance... As though some trauma had occurred after which black-hole-like mist is sucking away all the stuffs of sustenance. One by one words leave the poem, and the areas of white space around the skeleton increase--like fog, I guess. Now what is this trauma? Maybe it is like the atomic shadow in which Niedecker wrote "In the Great Snowfall before the Bomb"? --I mean to say, maybe it is the cheerless historical moment we share? Or, it might be something more personal I guess. The haunted and abraded landscapes Massey writes about aren't much different than those which Beckett's characters doss down in, obtaining surreptitious slumber by sleeping under arches, on dorr-steps, dark entries, etc. "to give the impression that we exist" (Godot).

Really the landscape Massey situates his writing in is neither urban nor rural, nor even suburban, but it delineates precisely what German planner Thomas Sieverts calls the "zwischenstadt," or the "in-between city" to use US critic Matthew Stadler's translation. It's the place that has more people living in it than you'd think. And the place with the most dreams clinging to it. In "June," Massey writes, "Dangled above/ the traffic's rasp:/ / a contrail/ / a crow/ / a nail gun's echo." That's the whole poem. The colon after "above" plays a similar function as the semi-colon that breaks Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" into two distinct, yet eerily similar parts--the mirror function you might say. The white of the contrail, the black of the crow, the sharp sudden burst of violence of a nail-gun, all these combine *above* the traffic, or more precisely its rasp, to produce a square foot of hell that just keeps sailing up away from earth, like a pillar of salt, until you can't see any more, nor hear any more--its top notes, the echo.

Sometimes the poet stumbles, and too obviously contrasts the ephemeral beauty of nature with the rancid productions of man. (The "spider web/ wind/ ripped)/ / weighted with/ a wet receipt." And sometimes his search for the verb *ahurissant* pins him to the ground and pummels him senseless. You want to give him a good dose of Cold Comfort Farm. And yet if he didn't overdo things from time to time, we wouldn't find him of such interest. His writing is a gift, a corrective, a kick, a pine cone. As all things, he is precious.

I would actually give this four and a half stars, but Amazon doesn't do half stars.

According to the short bio at the end of the book, poet Joseph Massey wrote all of the poems in Areas of Fog while living in the north coast of California, a fact that seeps into nearly every piece in the book. In his short, lyrical poems, Massey uses the weather and his surroundings to create a mood of longing and loneliness, like when he says, "versions /of silence /rain holds /close, /closing around us." in the poem "2:08 AM."

There is no underlying narrative in most of the poems, but there are pieces that allude to the idea of a broken relationship, of the inability to communicate with each other: "what's between us - this/ chasm of/ vocabulary". As a whole the book seems to be more concerned with creating a world and a mood than articulating a particular story. The idea of levels of silence is one that Massey returns to often in the book, as in the opening poem "Conversation": "Words, we/ have none./ We're lost/ in the tone/ splayed/ between/ shadows/ bending" and the later poem "August" where he writes, "not quite silence, as if/ silence ever is - "

He makes frequent use of echo within poems, as in when he says "The ocean's form/ churns toward/ stacked boulders/ where it breaks/ before breaking/ again against/ sand." in "Where It Breaks". But the poems in this collection also echo each other, coming back again and again to the tides, the moon, rain, wind and fog, to ideas of light and shadow, to varying forms of scattered debris. There's a pulp mill that appears in several poems, but then also appears in the form of "last week's news: a pile/ of rain-soaked/ pulp on the sidewalk."

Massey writes in extremely brief, almost Imagist lines. His poems have a haiku-like quality, especially in the section "Bramble." But he is not merely recording what he sees. In "Listening to Joseph Ceravolo's Home Recordings," he writes "Static/ brackets each /syllable." and one gets the sense he wants the reader to pay attention to that static in this collection as well. At their most successful, the small lines capture beautiful, intimate moments, but at times I did wish for a little more variety. "There are seasons here/ if you squint," writes Massey in "Autumnal Equinox," and the same can be said of his poetry, but every so often, I wanted a break from squinting.

Areas of Fog is like an Impressionist painting: look at it too closely, and it seems to be merely colored dots on a canvas - perhaps there are some lovely colors, but after a while they begin to look the same. If you take a step back and look at it as a whole, however, a mood and landscape begins to emerge from pieces. "On the horizon/ what you thought/ was exhaust/ from the pulp mill/ was rain frayed over the mountains." It's a delicately drawn and lovely, albeit lonesome place.

(note: i also posted this review at [...])

Joseph Massey's poems deceive you, first with their brevity, then with their impact relative to their size.'Arcata Marsh' is a representative poem for me, a terse and agile nine-liner that, unlike some other nature poems, rests confidently on its posts and dares to leave enough whitespace to hear the marsh noises. I can't recommend it highly enough.