A little more than halfway through Lavinia Greenlaw's new book is a poem called "Against Rhetoric," which is the most striking thing in the collection. It presents itself as a reply to Lord Chandos, the fictive Elizabethan poet who, in Hofmannsthal's Ein Brief, explains why he has ceased to write: the world, which once seemed wholly unified, now appears irrevocably divided; experience has become a kind of flux in which the mind may be unexpectedly invaded by extreme apprehensions of significance or sudden unbearable sympathies (Chandos is driven to despair by the sight of a beetle trapped in a pail of water); but words, which once seemed joined to a natural order, no longer correspond either to objects in nature or to inner thoughts and feelings. Against Hofmannsthal's bizarre and powerful articulation of the modern predicament, Greenlaw surprisingly adduces the figure of Plato's Theaetetus, the young philosopher who

complained to Socrates
of dizziness when asked to see beyond what is
as it is named.

Greenlaw concludes, with Socrates: "His sickness was wonder." This may not seem like much; but by conflating Theaetetus's "wonder" with the "sickness" of Lord Chandos, Greenlaw startlingly reverses Hofmannsthal's implication, and says something original about the poet's relation to language. Chandos's inner mayhem is not a debilitating weakness but a species of awe, the inevitable response of a sensitive mind to the world. Rhetoric is the opposite of awe, since it compromises the poignant and terrible volatility of human response by reducing it to an artificial intelligibility. Thus Chandos ceases to write, because not to do so would be to deny the power that has made him powerless, the roar of nature that drowns out words:

When things lift away from themselves,
we can do no more in words than meet them
with a similar. Why not remain speechless?

But if Greenlaw's turn casts some suspicion on the poetic impulse, exposing the limits of metaphor ("we can do no more in words") and portraying the desire for rhetorical form as a variety of evasion, she also points to the possibility of a verse that holds true to wonder. Greenlaw's poem argues that the mind which rejects the crudity of rhetoric may still look to express itself by some less rigid means. We may be "out of rhyme," as Greenlaw reminds Chandos, but we are not out of poetry.

As a set of ideas, as an argument about poetry and experience, as an inventive solution to the crisis of postmodernity, this is extremely interesting—so interesting that the rest of the book falls flat around it. Greenlaw, whose past work has frequently involved the nature of scientific inquiry, is an intelligent, engaging poet; but as an artist she seldom equals her capacity as a thinker, and her solution to the disparity is too often to decimate her thought. Minsk is by and large a conventional sequence of poems dealing with conventional themes of place; a number of poems about childhood lead to a contrived meditation on history and the attractions of the London Zoo. Aesthetically the sequence cannot be made to enter into the reeling wonder of Theaetetus. One senses Greenlaw's attempt to capture it, but she seldom gets beyond, on the one hand, a kind of dramatic murkiness and, on the other, a kind of dramatic sincerity. The language is generally unremarkable—"I keep my distance, as things turn blue" is roughly the level of expression, and at times one has a glimpse of the breathless and credulous tendency that has marred Greenlaw's criticism: "we must eat bad bread and dance / into the mountain where our souls / will perish or swoon." Only occasionally will one of Greenlaw's ideas flash out, like the waking dream she describes which, "early that morning, / had flicked its magnificent tail and then gone."

— Brian Phillips