Starred Wire

Ange Mlinko

Coffee House Press



Ange Mlinko monitors weather, follows people, abides children, walks in gardens, takes in architecture, monuments, libraries and brownstones, reads in cartography, genealogy, and travels. Jeepers. I’m seeing epiphenomena here. I hesitate to say I don’t believe in ghosts, unless they’re a "bear hug of smog” or “beans infusing the cream,” as Mlinko wills it. And before Starred Wire I hadn’t imagined that a mix of imaginary landscapes and brisk realism, typical only of Elizabeth Bishop, previously, could be pulled off these days (2005), finically, urbanely, that is, with requisite erudition cavorting against chiffon-like strokes of a painter’s light, as in “Everything's Carousing”: “Even the Baroque get lost in it. / Grass vests the dirt lest wind, twanging the skyscrapers // that merely sleeve the elevators, as we go sleeveless / except for the atmosphere, file it under ‘oceans.’” 



As Bishop had her New York moments, her “Varick Street,” her Brooklyn “cloud of fiery pale chemicals,” Mlinko has Dear Soho, Riverside Park, a “Secret Chelsea,” yet Mlinko is entirely tuned to New York pacings and sensual logics. This is never more so than when Mlinko speaks of other places like Boston (her former hometown as well as Bishop’s): “Venice must be like Boston, on the water / north of things’ center…" She advises, “One can make the room of coincidences the bedroom” which she assumes is “Like that secret rose garden at Harvard” (Radcliffe, actually). More urgent, the New York qualities we most could do with suffuse this poetry: the worldly reference — “Boolean chastity,” "Taoist gestational how-tos”; the crazed simile -- “The winter trees look like Catherine Deneuve”; and the nuttier conceit -- “You’d have to hair-spray a dragonfly / on its way to the Faerie Queene”; along with the crucial, appositional everyday data reminiscent of NY’s first generation -- “Logs are crossed in the fireplace. / The casserole is put out on the porch to freeze. // They invite me to sniff the new freesia body bath set. // ...The subdivisions age.”


I return to Bishop, though, to underscore Mlinko’s world-centered, life-transformative accomplishments. Early poems of Bishop’s were marked by non-soporific, precisely illustrated reversals of figures and facts, a “Man-Moth” whose shadow “is only as big as his hat,” vistas turned upside down “Sleeping on the Ceiling” and “Sleeping Standing Up,” a preference for the iceberg with “correct elliptics” over the tour boat. Mlinko similarly arbitrates between ghoulish realia and imagined alternatives, recognizing, “I could...be original every time, for the conversions / that inspiration is. A phantom face value haunts me, / but the inverted library; candles at the bottom of the pool; / these are the ghosts of the glass house designed / to be invisible in a wilderness…" Mlinko adds, simply, “life is a thesis,” and she seems almost to mean it. It’s a set of theses, down-to-earth, which she also calls dreams where “there is communication between interior and exterior, as they say of labyrinths.” She traipses through all these “adult doldrums” despite a “cortical wrinkle” or two, “cognomens spilled from burlesques” and “the slumber of driving,” because, among other secrets, she knows the difference between “Transformation vs. Encryption,” between “false rich and the false poor,” between socialism “on the firing line” and socialism “on the railroad rainbow,” a practical acknowledgement, in short, of “a glow on the horizon / that is also my sunburn…it's too late to be meteoric, silly.”



There are several poems without precedent, even as they pick up theses from elsewhere in the book. “The Intrigues” is one instance. I have already cited some of its text (“phantom face value...in a wilderness”). The poem accelerates with prime mergers of metaphysical and practical inversions, “shadows feint across paths fallen trees.” Here Mlinko reaches semantic dissonance of a tall order. “If it is spiritual to have applications to make, / dogs patterning imprimatur, let flowers grow always in defiles / gluing flame to flame…" These words are part of another transformation in which “thinking the landscape...is the true outside.” Enough is omitted to beg for greater “relations in light patterns,” the design that is unseen but implicit in the pressed horn and brake of “spiritual” and “imprimatur.” Rather than attempting a language that is more knowing, Mlinko leaves the full figure out, only to assert her applications toward its end and a “nicer noise.” Her aim is modest and affirmative, to see “a kind of painting / different ways around the park,” bleaching and blurring with life, “not to be trapped in a dream.” This is said as Mlinko raises the taboo word, “ghost.” She observes that the ghost “goes about with a movie / playing on the underside of my umbrella” as it “devolves into dew blobs and whispers / of the lawyers…" Returning to the lawyers conquers the problem of gravity and of taboo, an unfeigned way of sharing a life of different ways around it all.