{"id":470,"date":"2017-06-04T10:01:23","date_gmt":"2017-06-04T14:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=470"},"modified":"2017-06-04T10:01:23","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T14:01:23","slug":"review-of-quartet-for-j-robert-oppenheimer-by-kelly-cherry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=470","title":{"rendered":"Review of Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kelly Cherry"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Kelly Cherry. Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer. <\/em>Louisiana State University Press, 2017. 143 pgs. $21.95.<\/p>\n

One of the pleasures of following Kelly Cherry\u2019s work is that it\u2019s so varied\u2014every book explores new territory. She has written in multiple genres about topics that fall within numerous academic disciplines. She seems to surrender to her obsessions, permitting them to lead her where they will. Her latest collection, Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer, <\/em>benefits from the range of her interests, as it does from her discipline as a writer, for with this book she has set herself an intriguing challenge. On its most obvious level, the book functions as a poetic biography of its title character, but it reveals the character of Oppenheimer and the experience of his times through references to T.S. Eliot and his own quartets, and to The Aeneid, <\/em>as well as many others. Cherry structures the book as a modern epic, though one developed through lyric as much as narrative. The individual poems, though not always written in received forms, contain sufficient echoes and instances of meter to feel regular. Cherry\u2019s skill with craft, in other words, permits her to weld formal to free so as to almost create a hybrid of the two.<\/p>\n

The opening poem invokes the muse in the manner of Homer or Virgil, but it doesn\u2019t take itself too seriously: \u201cInvoke a muse? How quaint.\u201d However, Cherry also suggests that those of us modern writers\u00a0 who consider a muse as little more than a conceit might want to rethink our attitude: \u201cBut is it quaint, \/ considering that words appear upon \/ the page almost before one\u2019s thought of them.\u201d She\u2019s right, of course; when the writing\u2019s going well, it often does feel as though something beyond our consciousness is guiding our hand. This invocation adheres to the tradition, asking for the right words not to bring the poet glory but in order to praise the epic hero appropriately, to honor \u201ca man, if not his killing weapons.\u201d A challenge for writers who wish to bring an old form, especially one that has been nearly abandoned by contemporary writers, into a modern context is to decide which of its elements to retain and which to relinquish. Cherry addresses that issue already in her invocation, asking to praise the book\u2019s hero without glorifying war. The ethics of a national poet, if that is what the creator of an epic is, have changed in the millennia between the classical period and our own.<\/p>\n

Undoubtedly because of my own readerly training, I found the poems that imagine Oppenheimer\u2019s emotional life most compelling. The first section of the book traces Oppenheimer\u2019s childhood and young adulthood, as he begins to reconcile himself to his difference from others. The opening of \u201cEast and West\u201d provides an example of Cherry\u2019s approach:<\/p>\n

Hard-working German Jews on the Upper West Side
\nput distance between themselves and the Ostjuden,
\n<\/em>who, they thought, were too Jewish, redolent
\nof shtetls and ghettos.<\/p>\n

The strange off-rhyme of \u201cshtetls\u201d and \u201cghettos\u201d catches my attention first, along with the assonance of those words and \u201credolent.\u201d But even in the first line, we notice the assonance of \u201cworking German\u201d and the alliteration of \u201cGerman\u201d and \u201cJews.\u201d What\u2019s particularly intriguing about these choices is that the similar sounds are most often not reproduced in the spelling, the soft \u201cG\u201d in \u201cGerman,\u201d for instance, alliterating with the \u201cJ\u201d in \u201cJews, or the \u201cor\u201d in \u201cworking\u201d creating assonance with the \u201cer\u201d in \u201cGerman.\u201d The reader\u2019s ear is challenged to do all of the work rather than sharing it with his or her eye. The music is more surprising than it would be if we could see it coming, and that surprise offers bonus delight.<\/p>\n

Cherry brings Oppenheimer into this poem in its second half. He was the son of one of these embarrassing new interlopers, but maturity is accompanied by perspective:<\/p>\n

like Mark Twain, he discovered that the old guy
\nhad somehow learned a helluva lot, and then
\nbelated love for the father flourished in the son\u2019s heart.<\/p>\n

The shift in diction catches the reader\u2019s attention here\u2014another instance of the poet not taking herself too seriously\u2014and the casual vocabulary protects the last line from sentimentality.<\/p>\n

The last poem in the collection, \u201cAshes and Stardust,\u201d is both transcendent and realistic. Oppenheimer has died, along with most of his generation and many of later generations. Each of us is here and then gone. That fact, however, does not evacuate life of its meaning. As the poem says, some leave evidence of themselves in books or art or scientific discoveries, but most do not. Most people loved at least one other person during their lives, and many of us love many others, but evidence of that love disappears eventually too. Surrender to nihilism is tempting here, especially given the book\u2019s focus on a discovery that has made immense destruction possible, but the poem concludes more compassionately: \u201cWe are here and then nowhere. Not there. Not there.\u201d This line doesn\u2019t suggest resignation as much as it does mystery. Even with all of the knowledge Oppenheimer acquired and created, even with all of the knowledge required for this book to have been possible, that mystery remains.<\/p>\n

A thorough discussion of Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer <\/em>would take pages and pages more. There\u2019s much to be discovered in it. It is erudite and it is allusive without being at all pedantic. It is a book that could only have been written in our time, not simply because of its subject but also because of its ability to praise and critique simultaneously, to reference generic conventions without being bound by them, and to tease the reader with its shifts in levels of discourse. It is a book that deserves to be read, yes, but also engaged with, discussed, analyzed, and argued about. I hope I\u2019ll be able to meet up with some of its other readers to do just that.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kelly Cherry. Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer. Louisiana State University Press, 2017. 143 pgs. $21.95. One of the pleasures of following Kelly Cherry\u2019s work is that it\u2019s so varied\u2014every book explores new territory. She has written in multiple genres about topics that fall within numerous academic disciplines. She seems to surrender to her obsessions, permitting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-areviewaweek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=470"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":472,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470\/revisions\/472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}