There are echoes of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets in Dan Chelotti's beautiful, haunting The Eights. Not in lengthy ruminations on time, or lofty scriptural allusions, but in the tone and the shape of Chelotti's book, which is occupied with loss in a way that resembles Eliot at his humblest. The four poems of The Eights comprise a perfect quartet themselves: an introductory poem that invokes the dead and introduces motifs; two central poems ("An Anthem for Three Thousand Voices," and the title poem) that illustrate grief in a collage of seemingly motiveless actions and decontextualized objects; and finally the concluding poem, "The Door This Door Peers Through," which reflects and refigures the previous poems like an opposing mirror.
Like Eliot's Quartets, Chelotti's The Eights poses questions about how to exist in the absence of what was, and how to negotiate the things that only temporarily persist—and skeptically offers language as a proxy for understanding. Where Eliot says, "Words strain,/crack and sometimes break, under the burden," Chelotti asks, "how can one piece of paper fill all the trenches?" Chelotti—clearly a poet in the postmodern tradition—employs the cracked, broken language, letting it guide the lines, syntax, and tropes in a way that makes Eliot's notoriously difficult poems seem not only tidy and meticulously ordered, but also somewhat quaint, like the "periphrastic study in a worn out poetical fashion" that he (again displaying skepticism) refutes in "East Coker."
If there is periphrasis in Chelotti's work (in lines such as "Like a game of charades in which I must resemble charades," or "To live, I suppose, is nothing new/But to die, I know, is nothing newer"), it is brief, and comes, like the other abstract language, embedded in strong imagery and expressed by a steady, intimate voice. The opening lines of the book, from "Staring At a Woodcut Elephant," express the speaker's position as witness to vacancy—what should be or have been, what is in relation to what used to be—it's a sort of subjunctive mood for the bereaved (located in the liminal "present" of Eliot's "What might have been and what has been/Point to one end, which is always present"):
I've always felt that when you cut into a tree the newly bared
wood should be warm, that, if in winter, it should steam the way
a kettle slowly disappears into the snow.
I guess I should also mention the city.
But he doesn't "mention the city" beyond this sentence. Instead the speaker recalls older men telling stories, and suggests that his own role is to watch and listen. "As a matter of fact," he says, "I hate finishing anything, this is why I love them." There are fragments of narrative action throughout the book ("I try to rip the wind back from the tree,/Look to invent a moth to color/The way sad people look at porches"). They outline reality, borrow its shapes and sounds, but they do not paint a detailed story of individual grief. Instead each line is a still life of its own—one spare scene after another—calling attention to what's missing, untold. Like "the newly bared wood" that does not give off steam, the objects and actions that order Chelotti's poems are marked by absence, or by what they lack the ability to do.
Chelotti is at his best when he lets tension build between lines and stanzas, combining the concrete and the abstract. As in "The Invention of Solitude," the third part of "An Anthem for Three Thousand Voices:"
Three thousand and one, or three,
The mad's slow circling footsteps
Trace an alphabet I am certain I use.
I spell vase, I return, I stare at the dog
Ripping my sweater to shreds:
I stand interested and removed,
I want to search and never find
The moon's subtle ability
To never show itself as the moon.
The paratactic lines of the second stanza reveal the mechanism not only of grief, but also of the poem itself: one action after another, one line after another; the speaker "interested and removed" but aware of the strange, unseen "alphabet" that he uses. Then the third stanza, with its grainy syntax (the double negatives and the split infinitive in "never find[ing]…the moon's ability to never show"), and that tongue-teasing "subtle ability" in the midst, almost—but not quite—evades us. There is a sense that nothing—even language—is quite equal to this project of being witness. Like throwing a sheet over a ghost, any endeavor to reveal the absent only demonstrates how inadequately the medium performs in direct contact with it. But the persistent, active "I" in the lines (spelling, returning, staring, standing, and wanting) grounds us in "the trying," as Eliot calls it. Each poem is another "raid on the inarticulate" (from "East Coker").
"The Eights," the strongest poem of the four, makes the best use of line, imagery, voice, and action. Divided into eight parts with subtitles such as "Learning to Ignore the Dead," "This Is the Dream for the Smaller Flowers," and "Intermezzo With Hinges," it draws out the themes of the previous poems, and achieves a perfectly surreal mood.
I was almost through when the eights appeared
I was churning compost in my backyard
They were silent and unwilling to confess
If they were thinking or still
I cloistered them in the skin of my left arm
Hoping to someday find my arm again
In this pile of broken eggshells
The light never bothers to reflect
I asked myself,
Is there hope we will someday return
From this dust-ridden bowl of oranges?
If we were reading a novel, this would be the rise to the climax. The speaker, "churning compost," processing the decay that feeds life, encountering the metaphor that drives the book. The eights are numbers of a number, personified. They are disembodied but willful. They motivate actions and thought (often absurd). They exist, but can't be seen. Chelotti begins to repeat "the eights," and in the way that repetition can erase all familiarity with a word, "the eights" gradually becomes something other.
The eights: the name I've given you.
The eights: the rocking of the faithful.
The eights and the tide moves slowly over the soldiers
[…]
The eights. The eights.
The words I've spun to ignore the dying.
The flat stone I press as the phone rings once
And gives way to a weeping train.
The final movements of "The Eights" are powerfully orchestrated: measured, revelatory—the kind of lines one reads slowly, then slower, to dwell longer in the beauty as the tenor sinks in. In "Little Gidding," Eliot advises,
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion."
Chelotti's The Eights should be approached similarly: it is poetry that is truly engaged in the way language evolves with the accumulation of time and one tragedy after another, and in that way these are lovely, startling, grand, and important poems. Read as elegy, as ode to the dead, or as hymn to the many little object-gods that give shape to our losses, The Eights refuses to not see the absence and thus discovers its fractured, peripheral wisdom.
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