Poetry Review, Spencer Reece's "The Clerk's Tale"

Poetry pundits, including this one, will be keen to align Spencer Reece’s Bakeless Prize-winning debut with Robert Lowell and his Life Studies. Reece doesn’t have exactly the same blueblood that ran in Lowell’s New English veins, but it’s close: Reece penned The Clerk’s Tale over fifteen years while working in a Brooks Brothers, which lends an air of taste and refinement to the themes at hand; the landscape is less strictly Northeastern than Lowell’s, but the tambor that undergirds his depictions of rich Florida shares with Lowell (and Stevens) the sentiment that death mothers beauty. Indeed, Reece’s exemplary “Cape Cod” could easily slip between “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereaux Wilson” and “Grandparents” and fool more than a few MFA students.

Reece is not so easily defined, however. Chords he plays that Lowell played only begin to define the strangely quiet, oddly echoing music Reece authors. The latter might be said to have begun his work as Lowellian variations, adding grace notes here, there shifting the tempo and key, before long ending up with a much-changed thing. For the grace and confidence of Reece’s poems can’t be accounted for by merely reading him against one of his (obvious) inspirations. The gray sensation of dying and grim ends may run through Reece’s poems, but completely new are such assessments as this one from “Autumn Song”:

… and I breathe in the subtle
approbation of death coming as I recognize the Byzantine look

of the trees emptying themselves of themselves. The leaves fall
like leaflets in a relentless war and the architecture of skeletons
becomes more and more apparent…

Or this from “Tonight”:

I listen to the dust from the city

gather on the necks of the saints
at the hospital’s exits I exit.

Such repetitions—“emptying themselves of themselves”, “exits I exit”—complete the implications of mortality by invoking the speaker’s presence as witness and actor. So much of Lowell, and the lesser Confessional poets, contents itself to transcribe the entropy that warps the circles in which we’ve traveled. That Reece locates himself in the natural processes of decay redeems their potential for beauty and testifies to the fact that not all is lost.

Which isn’t to say that the poems here are all doom and gloom. Reece revels in le mot juste and freely spends his linguistic fortune: in “Diminuendo”, “two lovers liberate themselves in the grasses”; in “Midnight”, “Sheep maraud across the hill’s back, / exhilarated by the dirt smells born again by spring, / the wind haunted with the songs of comrades now gone.” Especially agile with respect to the lyric and narrative impulses are Reece’s series of ghazals, “Spring Ghazals” and “Ghazals for Florida”, which switch between mentions of Anne Frank, Dostoyevsky, dead schoolchums, Cabaret rehearsals, arch adagia (“Everybody lies, I guess, and it usually happens in spring, / when the sky plumes to a deep Jesusy blue”), and ecstatic decrees (“Hey you! Come unto me! Let the meadow march into my mouth!”). Reece may just as well be addressing language itself rather than spring when he writes “How you resex the swinging trees / and sing our trembling skins to sleep.”

By and large, however, these poems ache to declare the self within the natural, cultural, and personal worlds as they each smolder away. Reece’s pursuit of this project seduces even more than the giltwork of his most lyrical moments: poems like “The Clerk’s Tale”—to which The New Yorker dedicates an entire back page—exert a beguiling effect. By describing little more than the routines he and a fellow clerk follow while closing up a Brooks Brothers, Reece asserts himself with whispery insistence:

We are more gracious than English royalty.
We dart amongst the aisles tall as hedgerows.
Watch us face into the merchandise.
How we set up and take apart mannequins
as if we were performing autopsies.

As these lines entreat, they also dare—between the surfeit of material goods that surround us and the boundaries of our lives, there is a middleman. From there it is suddenly easy to see Reece’s interest in the line, the liminal, the means of transmission from outer to inner and thou to I. “We move to the gate. It goes up. / The gate’s grating checkers our cheeks. / This is the Mall of America.” Yes, and these are its occupants: unobserved but observant, injured but hoping to mend, alone, Reece says, but whose gestures are always fraternal.