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Against Paradise

Let's nab this corner table, where you
and I can chart the software
on that girl.
                             From —Son of Babbitt

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Reviewed by Katharine Coles
        ----Utah Arts Council, Salt Lake City.

As its title implies, the poems in Jonathan Holden's Against Paradise are uneasy even about what their speakers love or, at least, desire; and they may, though they don't always, participate in what makes their speakers uneasy. Regardless, the line between good and evil, to reduce the argument, is in the best poems here difficult to distinguish, tending instead to remain open to revision and argument and surprise.

The astonishing opening poem, "A Personal History of the Curveball," for example, is both a nostalgic look back at boyhood and an elegant, adult discourse on the nature of power.

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 As do many of Holden's poems, this one begins with a simple dichotomy: The power to throw a curveball may be either "a gift/or else some trick." Holden keeps complicating that dichotomy, however, until it becomes impossible to distinguish which side the poem wants to take. In some ways, technique wins: the adult speaker can name both the principle that makes a curveball possible and reasons "magic" can't measure up: triteness, the helplessness it implies. But children on the edge of mysterious, terrifying adolescence, along with the other powerless, still must believe in magic:

what other word does the heartbroken
or the strikeout victim have
to mean what cannot be and means what is?

The question of the relative values of technique on the one hand and, on the other, of passion or sincerity is one that occupies Holden in many of his works. In this book it becomes a subject through which he interrogates another concern: the problem of moral absolutism, of certain kinds of fixity. Of course, taking a moral stand against what is fast and fixed in some views of morality contains its own ironies, and the best poems here work with this ambiguity.

In "Goodness," the speaker struggles with his own hypocrisy in letting "the widow Dettmer," who is "totalitarian" in her goodness, "make" him "a party member to [her] orthodoxy." He condemns her for rigidness and lack of humor; then he blames her for his own complicity in pretending, for the sake of expedience, to be what she believes him to be. Again, the objection is really to a system in which "good and bad have been divided into two": by consenting to participate in the widow's system, the speaker must both take the role of "bad" and pretend at the same time to share her simplified vision of goodness. The poem becomes increasingly complex and the speaker increasingly entangled, until finally he establishes his own polarities:

I manage that villainous polite smile
we reserve for those who are good–
those bastards who always leave us lonelier,
who accept us without question for
everything we are not.

In using "we" in the last lines, Holden invites the reader to participate in the speaker's exclusions as the speaker has participated in the woman's. It is not only the widow's behavior and the speaker's, then, that come into question, but our whole notion of "goodness." This concern is further pursued in such poems as "Son of Babbitt" and "The Wisdom Tooth."

A poem in which the tensions between two opposing worlds operate in somewhat different way is the title poem, "Against Paradise," which addresses questions of power and, in this case, its enforcement through certain forms.

The oppositions established in the first stanzas are largely simple ones, but the richness of the technique enriches the pleasure in the reading and the complexities of the points being made. The wealthy here are wealthy because they always have been; they therefore have a vested interest in maintaining an antiquated status quo that spurs the boy speaker into games of revolutionary violence, Though he resents their casual trespasses, he nonetheless envies the rich as well, longing to give his own lawn "the elegiac look/ of their estates."

The houses and grounds of the rich are kept like museums to their power; and though the speaker finds everything about their lives "conspicuously false and very trite," his language takes on a certain quirky humor when he talks about them:

Your dog,
like those dignified, melancholy dogs
varnished on the backs of playing cards,
should have a pedigree. It should maintain
a solemn, philosophical expression
and be named "Rex" or "Rusty."
In fact, everything should be of museum quality.

Still, the tension in the poem, arising as it does almost purely from the poem's technique–a playfulness the language maintains even as the speaker condemns a way of life–softens to an unfortunately single-minded rhetoric as the poem nears the last stanza. Here, the speaker returns in his imagination to his own home, where he practices throwing his curveball against the garage, his "threadbare tennis ball alive/ in the dead air." As the language comes to life here, it also becomes rhetorically one-sided, allying its every and its beauty only with the life the speaker is accustomed to. Though the speaker offers such wonderful images as that of the rich "nymph, fawn, satyr wired/in their casual positions" around the swimming pool, such descriptions become not playful but cruel in their alliance with such words, unredeemed by stylistic tension or irony, as "banal" and "torpid." Ultimately, they become dogmatic as well, setting up pure oppositions that the other poems resist.

It may be too much to ask that every poem rise to the level of such stunners as "The Personal History of the Curveball." Perhaps ironically, I might be more patient with a lesser book; set beside what this book offers at best –virtuosity in which moral vision is inherent–the weaker poems seem pale and far too simple, and, when they falter, they become guilty of what the best poems stand against.

Still, a reader looking for examples of what a poet committed both to a strenuously complex moral vision and to the technique that makes the accurate translation of this vision possible would do very well to read Against Paradise. It is well worth the many fully realized poems it contains.

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