Pierre Alferi: Oxo
(Translated by Cole Swensen; Burning Deck, Providence, R.I., 2005; paperback, 60pp, $10; isbn 1886224668)

Pierre Alferi has published four books of poetry in his native French: Oxo is the translation into English by Cole Swensen of his third book (Kub Or, 1994). Although it would have been interesting to have the French original on the page opposite the translated text, it's evident from the acknowledgement that poet and translator have worked in close collaboration. (Also one can make out the case for exclusion of the originals on aesthetic grounds because, for this book to work, its presentation must remain visually sparse and tightly conceived.) The language style that results is informal, American and spare.

The book's structure relies on the notion of the bouillon cube, with each poem two dimensionally reflecting a side – but this is no conventional regular hexahedron, rather one reliant on cube as in root, in this case a cube root of seven. Each poem is made up of seven lines of seven syllables, with each section containing seven poems. These comprise the 'cube' which Alferi offers to imaginative dissolution.

In Hebrew the number seven represents completeness and totality; in Oxo, the poet seeks to make complete, to give shape, pattern to disparate experiences of daily city life – the seven sections represent the completeness, the totality of the ordering system. The floating impressions of a succession of external and internal experiences require structure if sense is to follow, poet and reader work side by side as the generators of such order and understanding.

An idea of what's being attempted is signalled in 'preface', the seventh poem in the book:

here is seven times seven
times seven times seven a
far-fetched grunge idea for
you in hard cubes of almost
anything goes like on T.
V. in fact it's almost as
good as compacting the trash

preface

It's 'a grunge idea . . . like on T.V.' and like TV the book combines all things together regardless of connection or harmony; the unifying principle is the medium, as here it's the bouillon 'compacting the trash'. The artefacts of the low and high cultures of the Paris cityscape are ordered within the book like a succession of adverts within a commercial break which jostle for our attention while sequentially contributing to a greater picture. The book's final poem, entitled 'coda', talks about the absorbency of 'tampon words', at once both redolent of personal and cultural reference, which need to be 'unfurled', dissolved in our psyches if we are to glimpse beneath surfaces. Interpretively, we must create the 'boiling water' in which to dissolve these poems that represent to us the variety and intensity of experiences we daily encounter but may fail to make mean. Alferi suggests that just as under scrutiny the poems will continue unfold new meanings, so too will experience. It's like greedily supping the bouillion:

ah it's so very ah how
absorbent these tampon words
made to be unfurled so
quick one more one last one quick

coda

 

The book's first poem introduces the notion of a shuffled 'flip-book', which fits appositely with our experience of the rapid succession of scenes that ensue, that and the cinematic technique of the jump cut. Playing such a central part in contemporary life, it's little surprise that the media should occupy Alferi's attention – cinema, TV, the Walkman, advertising are reduced to their cubes of scrutiny.

But everything's worthy of attention. In 'regular', the poet focuses on the meaning-full, important sounding, quasi-scientific language of a health product ad, replete with its evident vacuous inability to deliver – the 'if' of the poem's beginning creating the logical uncertainty of what the 'low low price of regular' can never buy:

if it's true that it contains
quite naturally the enzyme
necessary for modern
life then this built-in leak-proof
agent protects enriches
the ozone layer at the
low low price of regular

regular

Other of the poems in the 'shuffle' deal with street and commercial life, politics, music and the ways in which figures from high culture, such as Charles Ives and Flaubert, can inhabit a consciousness in the present:

. . . all I can tell you
is that life which paces you
in the distance as Paris
once did me will but too late
be completely fulfilling.

the france of henry james

Oxo expresses Alfieri's determination not to be paced 'in the distance'.

The tone of the poems range from humorous, satirical, affectionate, resigned, committed; alienation is never an issue, with the poet at all times prepared to engage intelligently with the variety of experience/reality he encounters. The language throughout is spare and precise, as one might expect given the strictures of form, almost devoid of tropes, closer indeed to what Aristotle might have described as rhetoric. The cube device allows for nothing wasteful – dissolution of the bouillon is only possible through the reader's engagement.

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