The Low Passions by Anders Carlson-Wee. Norton, 2019. 80 pp. $26.95 (hardback)

We must be the pupil that swells in the coming darkness,
The cargo worth carrying across the distances.

There are so many poets these days, so many good poets, that the name of the author of one
remarkable poem can be blown out of my head by the next. I owe my memory of the name Anders Carlson-Wee to lucky pagination. On a right-hand page of 32 Poems I found “Taken In,” a muzzy speaker waking early in a strange house and getting his bearings:

…You look around the room for clues.
Roughew of rifles. Couches. Crisco containers.
The tolling black hole of a Peter Pan clock.
A watercolor of Jesus stumbling from his tomb.
You scratch another match to eye the faces
on the fridge: not you, not you, not you, not you.

While I was still admiring the balance between the ordinary and the abstract, between Crisco and Christ and identity and the void (it was some time before I noticed it was a sonnet,) I turned the page and ran smack into “News,” an apparent litany of people who helped the speaker on the road, which veers into peril and paranoia and somehow resolves into gratitude. The poet’s name stuck.

The Low Passions is, on the face of it, a collection poems largely about a young man’s life on the road, a genre for which I have about as much natural sympathy as Jack Kerouac would have for a treatise on the history of Shetland knitting. But Carlson-Wee’s literary progenitor is less Kerouac than Virginia Woolf. Granted, a random reading of the poems could dazzle the reader with snapshots of train yards and dumpster diving, monologues by strangers met along the way, meditations on anthropology and instructions for wilderness and urban survival on the one hand and an exact rendering of the reflection of river-light on the underside of a brother’s hat-brim. He may zoom in for the detail of a fingerless man stymied by his cigarette lighter or step back to consider the ways we have used fire and fire has used us. Even reading the poems out of order a reader would be struck by the quality of Carlson-Wee’s attention, possibly his defining quality. He doesn’t obtrude. He witnesses, and comes back to report with a remarkable absence of macho posturing.

But read straight through, The Low Passions delivers much more than the sum of its parts. Its organizing principle is memory, memory as it actually operates, recursive, abstract, visceral and obsessive by turns. To read The Low Passions this way is to inhabit a simulacrum of someone else’s mind. So a childhood fight with a brother appears three or four times as it links to other memories or questions; what at first seems a series of awful and hilarious rants by a cousin slowly separates from the monologues of strangers and pulls at threads of earlier and later poems, making us reconsider what we thought we understood. It’s as these connections appear that the harmonies and dissonances, echoes and resonances begin to grow.

And yet the poems can stand in isolation. The monologues, for example, are documentaries of voice, remarkable as much for the respect and affection they convey as for the dramas revealed or implied. In “Ms. Range Wants to See Me In It” a woman asks him to try on her dead son’s shirt, we learn briefly about the death and are left with “Here they come again: / those shoulders, each time you turn away from me.” In “Jim Tucker Lets Me Sleep in His Tree House,” a father shows off his son’s carpentry, praises his son’s skill, glancingly alludes to his death and backs out by way of a slightly off-color joke. It’s one of the times that Carlson-Wee’s attention enables him to create the exact vehicle for the unstated emotion:

…Matter of fact, he had the eye
twice as dialed as mine—could name it
down to an eighth, even a sixteenth.
More than once I called bullshit
and took out the ruler, but my boy
was always right, even when he saw it
from an odd angle.

That passage is only one example of Carlson-Wee’s ear, and his ability to use specifics to turn anecdote into emblem. The shirt, the treehouse, the chain in the infuriated brother’s hand. In “Leaving Fargo” a carful of hot, bored small-town boys push a rustbucket to 100 mph on their way to see a derailment. There are references to a flood, a suicide, but Carlson-Wee not only doesn’t underline, he palms the ace when he describes the freight as “A local. Low priority.”

In his essay “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry,” Gregory Orr argues that a poet is born with one of four temperaments—story, structure, music or imagination—and that the poet’s job is to work to strengthen the other three. It’s a useful analytical tool, and The Low Passions comes through. Narrative is its motive force, and one of the delights of reading it is to relish the details, then step back to watch the levels of structure interlace. As to music, the power of many of the poems comes from the tension between the music of the language and the ugliness of the subject:

I go shoulder-deep through the yolk-crusted bags,
reaching—maybe fruit, maybe meat.
After a while you can name what you feel.

(I could have lived with one less dumpster-diving poem—but then, which?) And given the frequency with which a Neanderthal lumbers through, I wouldn’t be inclined to fault his imagination.

No, if anything is missing from The Low Passions, it is, well, the low passions. This may be the first road narrative in history in which the erotic/romantic is totally absent; the dog that does nothing this particular nighttime has Eros on his collar. Still, it is possible to read the whole book without noticing this absence, and the lack doesn’t diminish the book—the narrator has learned to be self-contained, has used restraint as a survival technique, and that is to the poems’ benefit. From the warm memories of strangers to a yearning, complicated affection for The Brother, there is no lack of love—you could even argue that the entire book is a collection of love poems for its subjects. But it does leave plenty of unexplored poetic territory for next time. Thank goodness