By Michael Lavers

In Rise Above the River Kelly Rowe writes about her brother, whose Huck Finn boyhood–building rafts and climbing trees–was shattered when a teacher sexually abused him. Gone is the boy who cries “the world goes on forever–- // and I’m the king!” Instead we get a man in free fall, ramifying trauma outward. He wrecks cars, he steals his dying mother’s morphine, he drives right from her funeral to the bank to get his share of the inheritance, and then disappears. Eventually he commits suicide after a stint in prison.

Lots can go wrong with a book like this. The risks involved grow in proportion to what’s at stake. But a great writer knows how to stand back from such subject matter, to achieve a clarity and distance that will let her see through the anger and the blame. Rowe is such a writer, and knows how to combine this objectivity with daring. She asks questions most poets these days don’t dare to, or if they do, ask them only with the safety blanket of cheap ready-made answers: Where does suffering come from? Where is God in the face of pain? What if the prodigal son never returns, or, if he does, brings not his penitence and love but chaos and suffering? And how might I have added to my brother’s grief?

What makes these poems essential reading, therefore, are the guts of the poet. Some of the poems can feel too insular, or too dependent on the context of the book. Some don’t go far enough, I think, and others go on a bit too long. But these are small stumblings in poems that lift so weighty a theme. A book that could have been all-too predictable in its emotional terrain becomes instead a masterclass of surprise, of self-interrogation, and even of hope.

The narrative unfolds in five sections, tracing, roughly, the brother’s initial state of relative innocence, the sister’s rage, the familial fallout, a turn toward Greek myth, and then a final section called “Reconciliation.” The fourth section, “Ismene,” is the most unusual, consisting of a single long poem that retells the story of Antigone’s lesser-known sister. In general, the poems get better as the book goes on, crescendoing through sections 3-5 into a grief that, like Sophocles’ drama, feels cosmic in scope, but also deeply personal and intimate. Several poems deserve to become canonical poems of trauma, to be read and re-read as many times as you can stand to have your heart broken. Too long to quote in full, “Prayer for Lucifer, Fallen” is one of these, and its concluding lines, spoken to God, linger with me more than any others in the book:

Maybe that’s what it means to be divine;

no wondering if there was something

you could have done, or worse, knowing

that there was, and you didn’t. But after all,

it was none of your business, was it?

He wasn’t your brother. No, no; he was mine.

The technique here isn’t showy. Content does take center stage, but form is working all its subtle and important magic from the wings. Look at the palpable but sneaky rhyme of divine/mine, the flirting with Milton’s pentameter, the long complex first sentence, and the short staccato triple hammer of the final line. The emotional devastation here has as much to do with Rowe’s handling of rhetoric as with the narrative itself, how she says what she says. Look too at the last lines of “Your Wedding,” an elaborate metaphysical conceit in rather ornate syntax, the final line of which rings out like wedding bells:

             She saw you across the yard

smoking when you had promised to quit;

you spread your branches wide

and grinned, wrapped her

in rustling green leaves,

as a little breeze, all that was left

of the storm, whispered

in mixed tones of desire

and impossibility

that daily office, that incantation:

her name, her name, her name.

Without the medium becoming part of the message these poems would not be art. They would be mere information, data, the private record of a private grief. But Rowe has made her own pain universal. How? The question is perennial, and impossible to answer in full. But all our oldest and most vital poems prove it can, and must, be done, and many of those poems, not just Antigone, have echoes here. Hamlet, for example, would recognize Rowe’s ambivalence about revenge, and in “Finding the Perp’s Facebook Page,” we see the poet’s anger in full bloom. For a moment we think the book will follow the path of revenge tragedy, but it takes a more surprising swerve into self-investigation, as in the powerful “Now, It’s Often Myself,” whose title’s sentence ends in the first line with “I hate”:

            How when you came

to the funeral—I was busy,

pursed my lips, wouldn’t pay

for your hotel, so you stayed

in a place where I couldn’t

unlock the rental car as I waited

in the parking lot and watched

the door to your room,

loose on its frame, a broken lock;

a stranger came out first, then you.

What did I expect?

She hates herself for forcing him to stay with other junkies, but, some of us with similar stories might ask: what choice did she have? The book offers no solutions to these moral dilemmas, and it shouldn’t, because, of course, there are no solutions. Instead, Rowe brings us into the questions, confronts us with them, asking us to inhabit them with her. This poem then swerves into considering the landscape paintings of the 19th-century, and wonders how those artists could stand to paint such light, “God’s face,” such “longing for another world.” It then concludes not in the world beyond, the world of beauty, but here, back down on earth, in that hotel room, “with the curtain pulled, / a sleeve unrolled, beyond / the fast-gathering dark.”

Perhaps the main victory of this book is precisely this kind of uncertainty, the victory of ambivalence. How should one feel about a brother that is himself so divided? This is the question posed by “Legal Name Change”:

You left home;

the other one came back…

…dated a woman twice your age,

crashed the car our mother gave

you, crashed another and another,

into ditches, porches, ponds.

But we are far from Dr. Jekyll/ Mr. Hyde. Rowe knows better than to deny that these two brothers are the same person: “Everywhere you longed to go, / he drove you.” Much of the book struggles with this double identity. Where is that boy with the beautiful soprano voice, “who had the “gift of seeming to embody golden light,” whose face the poet can still see in the face of her own sleeping child? He’s never quite gone, the book suggests, but is also never quite there.

Images of dichotomy, of light and dark, pervade the book, a motif that echoes Milton’s (or Genesis’) theodicy. Where does the darkness come from, and why doesn’t light always prevail? The end of “God, Those Women at Your Funeral” describes the adorers of the dead brother “fighting over your ashes right there in the chapel.” And yet Rowe’s moral lines aren’t that easy to draw. It’s not the family vs. these women. It is these very strangers, “in their slippery summer dresses /  barely covering their scarred / and tattooed bodies” that teach Rowe, and us, something about how to live, something about what poetry should do:

maybe they were the ones

who understood the need

to fight fiercely for what remains

when the short day’s light is gone.

Though the darkness may seem in ascendancy, there is light, and it can be fought for. Some of my favorite lines echo this sentiment, and occur at the end of “Briefly, Sometime.” The faded grandeur and cracked grace of her brother is embodied in an old gold watch that

wasn’t worth much,

having stopped ticking

thirty years ago. Still,

if you held it to your ear,

and gave it a good sharp shake,

briefly, sometimes, it would go.

It is this elegiac note that becomes the book’s most evocative and essential, Virgil’s reminder that there are tears at the heart of things. Rowe captures this mood in one of her poem’s epigraphs, Plutarch quoting Alexander the Great: “Is it not worthy of tears that, when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not become lords of a single one?” What are we lords of? Maybe nothing. Maybe not even ourselves.

And yet. This book is not a dour one. That watch does, sometimes, briefly, go. There is light to be found, even if we have to fight for it, fiercely. The affirmations of these poems are all the more convincing weighted by the ballast of such profound grief. This book reminds us what poetry ultimately is for and can do.

In a 1994 radio interview, the poet Linda Gregg described the ultimate goals of her art: “The point is how the spirit and the heart take something that is plain and because of love, because of the spirit, because of a human life, transform that thing, without changing it. And yet it is translated into beauty, by the heart. It is lit. It is loved. By being named.”

Rowe’s brother is not changed. He is not valorized, or cheaply redeemed. But he is, like any fallen angel, beautiful. He is lit. He is loved. A poet is singing his “ now-buried name: / in Irish, Caoimhín, meaning  / handsome, gentle, / he of noble birth.” Only, his name is not buried, and neither is he. Not entirely. Inside these poems, something of that boy, and of his voice, and of the golden light he once embodied, still remains.