I agree Nate, the work deserves contact and Robin was right to press
forward as perhaps also he was right to propose the Prynne sub-list, since
apparently Prynne is so easy to neglect with all the regular otiose
shorthand. Some points about Liberties: it is a book of two parts whose
contiguity is not very overtly argued, or at least is not evident in any
unmistakable formal overlap. This for me has tended to mean a comparison
between the two; instinctively I prefer the second, though the instinct is
negative and even yet fairly unexamined. I felt at first, and perhaps
still feel, that the first part can be vague rather disproportionately,
often quite tenacious in aversion from the kinds of exhortative or
judgemental syntax that flexes itself into the far margins of the second
part. Instinctively I have to suspect the 'white' trope, its history is
so settled and abundant; when however the privileging of absence and
restraint is ended, as in the great boisterous stanzas of 'the city
adorned like a bride', I can return to that trope more hesitantly and
hopefully. Whiteness would seem throughout the book to mean several
things, principally: 1. the fantasy of impeccable conduct (the setting for
this trial being both -ethos- and -pathos-): white as 'unstained',
'blemishless' 2. virginity, as a kind of physical metaphor for that
conduct taken so long for granted; particularly the image of a virgin
bride, who through her resistance to prior advances and her temperance,
will inherit a late set of heaven's graces 3. the absence or erasure of
significant practical outcomes: this is not at all limited to the gameplay
of quizzing herself over What It Means To Put A Mark On A Page, though
this trope gets a bit of an airing; more tendentiously, this is the
absence of significant self-determinations in the form of constructive
commitment to the city as an image of love. This commitment is absent or
erased, partly because in these poems it is overridden by an invasive
pastoral damage (a reversal of the usual pastoral scheme of retreat). The
natural landscape is hazardous and oppressive, not left to mean what so
easily it -could-; constructive self-identification -- through passionate
rather than interested commitment to the future city -- is the form of
hope which the pastoral challenges and delimits. Perhaps some frenzy for
an undamaged nature is implicit in this. A wish for the city's true
counterpart, uninfected by its own susceptibility to rapacious
exploitation. 4. White seems not to mean caucasian, though I would want
to stretch it, perhaps insidiously, to mean so. Even generous remote
speculation is to some extent luxurious. This is a fact Brady has dealt
with in more recent poems, such as those she read at SVP the other night:
materialist idealism of the boudoir and powder puff, how do we escape
this and the blatant sarcastic turn it requires.

The book's syntactic economy is likewise split in two, a formal outgrowth
of the thematic shift from resistance to longing, both of which are
resistance still. The second part is excessive, in the best sense of that
term. It's kind of like a beautiful pile-up, sirens grinding into the
middle distance but for a second the wreck left unfiled. Because death
too is so pervasive, wound around words, not needing to stop them.
Snatches of narrative emerge in the second book, and it is perhaps these
that by themselves could -require- an excessive syntax, since they so
incorrigibly make a woman's face patent and still in 1999 can't stand
isolated without falling back on some hard-won category. So that
recursive abstraction is a kind of scaffolding for reflexive insight,
making possible what otherwise would be hopelessly probable: privacy. The
poems are so private and tender and violent to themselves, but this is not
the privacy of mere tinkering with meaninglessness, nor that of some
average fondling of an ego wrapped up in average earthly chaos. It is a
privacy which refuses any compass smaller than the radius of the city, or
the image of that radius secured by extreme vacillation and persistence.
Privacy then would be simply -my- way of being able to crave equity, the
fashion of -my- selflessness when I am alone. Whether this privacy is
fully achieved, or whether the recognition of its possibility is really
announced here, is not at all certain. Though I feel pretty sure it's
thrashed into view. The maintenance of this prospect at the same time as
the delicate attention to individual, sexual love (passions of hide and
seek) doesn't seem to be all that dialectical; there is a swapping and
swaying, and even a great deal of ethical-downpour with every beat of the
heart or swell of the clitoris, but in -moments of climax- our attention
seems often to be pulled finally away from social havoc and want, and into
individual passion and -need-. Mundane desire is insufficient for a
climax. Though mostly, both eyes stay fixed open.


Recent developments in Brady's poems seem to have showed some turn from
passion to interest: for me, a welcome shift. I keep following them and
admiring them greatly. These are driftnotes, spur of the cuff, toss them
aside, k
                                                                        




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