Philip Metres. A Concordance of Leaves . Richmond, VA: Diode Editions, 2013. 34 pp. $10.00, paper.
Consisting of one long poem “written on the occasion of [his] sister’s wedding in Palestine,” Philip Metres’ chapbook is set in 2003 and follows the author from his arrival at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, across the border into Palestine for the wedding, and back into Israel for his departure from Ben Gurion. These events are represented as important in themselves, and also as a cross section of daily life in Palestine. The quotidian nature of this cross section serves, in turn, to anchor Metres’ lyricism, which displays a wonderful lack of anxiety about being lyrical, neither apologizing nor overcompensating. The opposition of the everydayness of the plot with the ceremony of Metres’ language mirrors the metaphorical opposition of the book’s premise: a wedding, a coming together, in Israel/Palestine. A Concordance of Leaves’ balance of plot, style, and premise captures how politics can infect every aspect of daily life with banal indignities, yet at the same time disregard many moments of unexalted happiness.
A few lines in, Metres writes:
…the unseen
(
& inaccessible sea caresses our strange faces—
blind & we wait for our lines to be read
(
& this is the cemetery, where the father
of his father’s father’s father’s father’s
(
father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s
buried…
This is the poem’s primary stylistic mode: uncapitalized couplets separated by a parentheses—open for the poem’s first half and closed for its second. As the poem progresses, Metres alleviates the potential monotony of the couplets by using slashes to effectively indicate a line break in the middle of a line. But while the above passage is stylistically typical of the volume, the straightforwardness of its political message—invoking Israel’s control of the Gaza Strip (and thus access to the sea), and directly contradicting the Zionist slogan, “A land without people for a people without a land”—is not. The delivery of a political message, and particularly a well-known one, is rarely poetically successful, but in this passage, it is. That success is due, first and foremost, to the rarity of explicit politics in the poem, but also to the lyrical manner in which Metres conveys them. The consecutive repetition of “father’s” imparts a familial connection to place, a sense of home, that the phrase “There were people living on the land before it became Israel” cannot.
After landing at Ben Gurion, the author gets into the taxi of a man named Rami, a “sunglassed cabbie born in al-Quds, dead ringer / for Travolta circa Saturday Night Fever.” Unable to get to Palestine, “[swimming] in traffic for hours,” the author eventually ends up pissing on the side of the road, “half in ecstasy / ( / half in terror a sniper’s bullet would chauffeur me / from this place—pants undone, penis in hand.” Metres delivers political observation with devastating understatement—having to piss on the side of the road won’t make the evening news, but is just a commonplace of living on the wrong side of segregation.
The author eventually arrives at the wedding, and his depiction of its beauty indicts the region’s politics by implication:
scarved sisters are radiant with wide
mouths & waves & teeth & singing
)
& though there is the great unhappiness
framed in silent unsmiling faces
)
hammered on insides of houses
watching over all preparations
)
night is lifting the women
are drumming the tabla their voices inviting
)
a heart to break itself & open
a space another could nest inside
The wedding is the antithesis of Israeli-Palestinian political relations, beginning “because there is a word for love in this tongue / that entwines two people as one.” The opposition of the wedding and regional politics is moving, despite its obviousness, because it goes wholly uncommented upon. Metres’ silence brings the political tension into being.
A Concordance of Leaves vividly portrays a few everyday consequences of Israeli-Palestinian political relations, but isn’t ultimately about politics. Its subject is the wedding of the author’s sister in Palestine, a singular event. The poem’s occasional nature limits its scope, so that small truths take the place of political generalizations. Its journalistic quality assumes that we should try to know what’s going on, as fully as we can, before thinking about what we would like to have happen in the future. And part of what was going on in Palestine in 2003 was his sister’s wedding, as evoked by Metres in the following passage. Note the use of slashes to alter the couplets’ rhythm:
you my sister you my brother
outside the walls / in the wind
)
if Aristophanes was right
& we walk the world
)
in search of, a split-
infinitive of to love, if two
)
outside the walls / in the wind
should find in each other more
)
than mirror, then we should sing
outside the walls / in the wind
)
you my sister you my brother
that tree & stone may answer
In this passage and others, A Concordance of Leaves reminds us, through demonstration and description, that humans all over the world—including Palestine—exist in many aspects beyond the exclusively political. Politics, by its nature, relies on generalizations—it is, at heart, a process of the few speaking for the many. But life, on an individual level, is—by its nature—more specific than general, experienced as detail rather than politics. While the journalistic quality of Metres’ poem strongly registers the vast impact of politics on individuals’ lives, it just as strongly registers the countless non-political factors, such as conceptions of love and ritual, that also influence individuals’ experiences. William Carlos Williams famously wrote, “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” In its illumination, in all senses of the word, of the details beyond politics’ grasp, Philip Metres’ A Concordance of Leaves uniquely honors Williams’ conception of poetry’s purpose.