The Greek philosopher Heraclitus saw change as constant: "All is flux, nothing stays still." This simple and inherently terrifying truth-as well as the manner in which the imagination perceives it-is considered, reconsidered and turned over in a multitude of lights by Sofield in his new book. The collection has been a lifetime in the making (many of the poems appearing in a variety of sources over the years), and therefore possesses a timeless and omniscient quality that is overwhelmingly pleasurable when experienced cover to cover. The poems radiate a sense of completion, polished by the hands of a master craftsman whose rhymes and rhythms attenuate themselves when necessary, and dissolve into the background when not.
Yes, they have an omniscient feel, but they are omniscient only with regards to their own experience. Throughout his work, Sofield is concerned with reality itself; that is, with what constitutes reality for one particular life's line through time and space. As Sofield so eloquently writes in "Light Disguise: I. Russian Olive," "No layman's metaphysics here, nor art, / And nothing mystical … only a glass / that magnifies, diminishes, distorts / certain appearances within the heart's / halfhearted kingdom, glass whose one report / on all phenomena is that they don't / exist until by you or me they're felt. / Reflections raise a daydreamt undertone, / unmoving, near: imagination is / where even sense begins. Nothing's withheld / from its still-wanton make-believe; it is / what will, compulsively, make more of less."
Sofield's concern, like Shakespeare's in his sonnet collection, is to preserve something against the ravages of time, that ultimate and inescapable destructive force. In part II of the title poem, "Light Disguise: II. Atget at Ville-d'Avray," he writes: "Corot was right: / the solitary absolute / one may admit is that the light / that renders what we see must be / preserved ..." Sofield preserves that light with his iambic tetrameter (above), and questions and reconsiders it with the villanelle and other iambic variations throughout the book.
There is, perhaps, a great undercurrent of sadness flowing through the work. "Light Disguise" seems to revel in the power of the human mind, but also fears its limitations. "To look and slowly look a life / away, until the August air / resolves his sight: he will survive / the vacancy that underlies / whatever is. So once again, / the lens wiped clean, he'll verify / the shadow play. How else to spend / the days one has than witnessing / definitude? He is prepared."
In the poem "NO," Sofield offers a meta-poetic trip, following the mind's desire to formulate and apply meaning. After summoning and disregarding various stimuli, he settles for the sound of cicadas, and imagines and re-imagines them in various lights. The poem's ending, however, pulls the carpet out from under the reader's feet, leaving one suspended over a vastness that forces a re-analysis of how one comprehends meaning: "Sometimes / their clamor sounds to you like life; it becomes / a raw denial that summer ends, a disbelief / in death. No. Their fear of death is your fear of death."
Sofield balances his emotion with the keenest poetic sense, often undercutting his own elegant and erudite tone. He even takes a shot at himself in the conclusion to the poem "Aubade." The form of the poem is ingenious and reveals new information with each reading, but the ending brought a smile to my face: "May your comic Book of Dread / be closed, and may you once, delight in the form- / ing thought-balloon / that would chart / your dream: / Z ..." Truly, this poem reflects Sofield's life-long love affair with poetry. The pleasure of visually pleasing form could hardly have been overlooked by a mind that has delighted in that pleasure throughout the years.
Weaving throughout the entirety of the work is the metaphor of the mind's eye as a camera, dreams or memories as "negatives" and poetry (like photography) as the way "one registers what in the wind / of time will soon be lost …" In "That Moment Long," after recalling looking through family pictures, Sofield writes, "Renewed / by the camera's thick-grained metaphors, / my dreams that night were snapshots ... no, / were negatives of what had not / been photographed."
In the tradition of Elizabeth Bishop, Sofield offers us that self-correction that makes one feel like a privileged reader, eager to follow a mind open enough to correct itself on the page.
And we follow that mind, a mind troubled by the dark and empty, to the most beautiful of conclusions. In the third part of "That Moment Long," Sofield recalls the memory of his mother playing "Clair de lune" each night when his father was away during the War. "Night after night you would delay / that third, descending note, as if / you knew leaving us all adrift –- / yourself, and me, the light-washed night / in Illinois and somewhere in / Pacific battle zones-unites / us in impendency. Within / that willed arrest, time stopped. I learned, / at length, your one intent: to turn / event into potentialness / is to insist nothing can come / undone, to know that you possess / the force, incorporate, to stun / all flux until you'll let the next / note sound. Silent, you unperplex / being itself: that moment long."
For Sofield, "The only paradise is memory," and he offers us the art that swells forth from its bounds as independent of time or space. In the end, poetry is the only reliable force to hold back the flux of time, if only for a moment. Go get "Light Disguise," and peel away your own interprative slice from Sofield's carefully crafted and densely layered shades of meaning.