Book Review: Compression & Purity by Will Alexander

Compression & Purity

by Will Alexander

2011, San Francisco: City Lights Books

100 pages, paperback

$13.95

Compression & Purity extends Will Alexander’s compelling vital projects. I saw Will read from this book with the tremendous poet Cedar Sigo at City Lights Bookstore a week ago. Sunny blustery afternoon with an old Chinese gent hanging his laundry on the fire escape across the way in Jack Kerouac alley through the upstairs windows of the bookstore, standing room only. Cedar’s mom came for the reading. I had a good seat as I got there forty five minutes early. Will read from the core of the book and both shorter and longer pieces were choice:

In “On Scorpions and Swallows” Will delivers the maximum present moment:

I go blank
& seize vertigo
& gain a forthright diplopia

so when I look skyward
a doubled swallow seems to swarm
in a flock of endurance

and in “The Deluge in Formation,” birds continue driving forward Gertrude Stein’s continuous present:

I am speaking of chastisement
or cross-referential super-imposition

within this condition
I am more like a crow from crucial underwater fires
a crucial underwater crow

neither Chinese nor Shinto
but of the black dimensionality as hidden underwater mass

—and in this poem the Blood Penguin of an earlier poem shifts through totemic corvids:

which persists by daring
which seems at the surface
a purposeless kinetic
or a pointless Mandrill’s infection

saying such
I consider myself a reddish Shinto crow
then just as strongly
a black anathema crow

—so the poet transmutes time into figures, nerve and thistle coronas rebraided into frayed cordage, knotted language like the Andean quipu taut between verbal present and living presence. In tensile lines that are his most direct ever, fraught with somatic pungency, graced with seemingly (and very wonderful) “purposeless kinetic” jolt, the poet folds Sun Ra into Garcia Lorca, Bob Kaufman into Cesar Vallejo:

I am speaking here of your disrupted seasons
speaking with Lorca in in nomadic transpicuity
with Artaud in fleeting glimpses
your life obscured by aesthetic linkages
by broken luck & betrayal

I am listening to the salt inside your hunger…

(“Combustion & Leakage: for Cesar Vallejo”)

—in an age old orality extending through Shakespeare’s sonnets to e. e. cummings and beyond the present, the poet pronounces varied poems’ intents and purposes in the figures of his lines, reflexively purposing his “content’s dream.” In this delivery Will Alexander bodies forth his poetics whole, elegantly edged and fully at our service:

they can’t see my approach
my wayward dorsal looming
my lettering in black drizzle

it is my approach
my weaving
my sigil as curved embankment

therefore
I can never name myself
or plot myself
according to the sparks or splinters from the work bench…

…I am considered
as pointless positron without image
as hieroglyph
as sundial
as martyr

being leakage from a barbarous index province

(“Coping Prana”)

The short poems are striking, and the longer sequences replete with moving, wild compressions:

the horizon being mist
& lines of summa
& blank imaginary braille

(“Horizon as Parallel and Sonar”)

Compression & Purity is wholly Will Alexander’s gift, thistle violet nerve steel.