Sharon McCartney writes about relationships, almost always in terms of loss, and her first book’s epigraph from Frost (“Here are your waters and your watering place/ Drink and be whole again beyond confusion”) is an articulation of her method. The book begins by tracing a genealogy of knowing, with the poet describing herself as a fetus, a something that is “nothing yet.” This is the first poem, and the McCartney persona has yet to be established, but she caps it with what will become a signature move, using the final lines to give the poem a lift, a terse what-for, with her Mother’s reflection on the local conditions: “It’s unnatural, she thinks, all this growth/ and no rain.” It’s impossible not to think that McCartney the poet is having her mother think of her as being unnatural. This is the first relationship in the book: what begins as “nothing” becomes a strange pairing.

The next poem, “My Mother’s Face,” introduces loss as McCartney’s major subject. Her sick sister’s brain cancer is introduced as a triangulating influence on her mother’s attention. McCartney is “too young to be told/ my sister will die” but she is aware enough to “know something’s wrong when I smell it,/ the breath of ash/ on the oven’s tongue.” And so the dominant dynamics of McCartney’s family life are established: the father is peripheral and the mother, rendered as a creature of domesticity, in terms of a vacuum cleaner and socks, will forever be grieving a child – a circumstance referred to as a “grim marriage.” McCartney’s family poetry is totemic: it offers up the mother and the father as sad, grievous creatures. The father is distant, unreliable; the mother is locked into a kind of perpetual terror. McCartney gets to the heart of knowing her mother and herself when she writes in “Nickels in a Cup” that “I was only 20 but I believed/ I was old enough to walk away…/ thoughtless, gleeful as a mother/ who’s never lost a daughter,/ who doesn’t know how a woman can hate a body and hurt/ so much she won’t say it…” Here McCartney is simultaneously expressing the cheerless selfishness of her younger self while also acknowledging that her mother was deeply wounded by the death of her daughter and that there was integrity to the mother’s bearing of that pain. McCartney may have been twenty then, but the crafter of this poem knows better.

Which brings me to the question of confessional ethics. A certain Mommy Dearest anti-ethic often lurks behind a book of this sort, painting others as culpable and the poet as blameless victim. McCartney is far too honest, and complicated, for that. She writes in “Niagara, 1968” that she
hate[s] the scene we’ve become—

silver rails sparkling

with spray, my mother

on her knees—and the people

who stare, women in bright

slacks, mortified children,

together in a way we will

never be.

McCartney confesses to what would be typical in that situation, a resentment of her lot, the artful use of the word “mortified” being a sly reference to the death in all of us, the death of the “scene” being transferred to all the other children. It cannot be forgotten – McCartney will not let us forget, because it is central to knowing her as a poet – that she was a typical child faced with unfairness. There are other moments of vulnerability, as when McCartney’s poetic self whispers “fuck you” to her dying sister or when McCartney writes in “I’m Outside on the Bricks” with regards to that flailing, incontinent sister that “I would/ feel sorry for someone if this/ were unusual.” McCartney is no saint and gets at a truth of human nature: a willingness to respond to minor impositions, while desiring to avoid greater ones that require a duty, a duty which would distort her life.

The ur-moment in the collection comes when McCartney’s mother in “Yellow Sun Dress” does home physiotherapy on her dying daughter’s limbs and looks at the quailing healthy daughter and asks her “What, after all,/ do I want?” This is the essential utterance of McCartney’s poetry: McCartney with her failings as daughter, unable or unwilling to accommodate the bully death, the perfect “after all” a commonplace elevated to the most significant piece of conversation in the book. After what? After being healthy, after being able to live, but also after coming through with a dying sister, after knowing things that no child should ever come to know so soon. After wanting rebellion, and choosing rebellion against her own unique circumstances. “After all” are two words that carry much freight, effortlessly conveyed.

In what will come to be more fully developed in Against, “Halfway Up The Coast, I Phone My Mother” marks McCartney’s first use of sex in her poetry and it is interesting to note how it is linked with pain. McCartney writes that she is “testing the curve of muscle,/ testicles dark and tender,/ penis rising as inevitably as pain.” Thus even sex is knowing, Janus-faced, and it says something psychologically about this mature poet whose first rendering of sex in verse is not in terms of joy, but rather hurt. She ends the poem with “Already, I am closer,” meaning that she is not only closer to her lover with this knowledge but also closer to truth.

But then, ah, to love. The dedicatee of Under the Abdominal Wall was her husband Mark Jarman. In “Jarman Motors” she addresses him poetically, enamoured and headlong, writing “Everyone I meet has your name” in the first-line admission that is typical of the lovestruck, seeing the lover in the fated everything and the fated everyone. She then ominously forecasts later in the poem “It’s like dreaming about someone/ who’s dead.” Which means that McCartney in her first love poem links the totality of love with the cosmos of impermanence. This is a link that is fundamental for understanding what matters for her as a poet. And it will not be the last such linkage: her later, more powerful collection Against is a post-mortem of this same relationship. It is eerie that the poet-self’s pessimism was a kind of wish-fulfillment, that love first ventured in this early poem as obsessive became finite and somewhat elapsed in what must have been the poetic equivalent of calling her shot. Here is that ruthlessness again, that path to self-knowledge. It’s the kind of confessional poem that might cause trouble in real life, that might trouble the husband and kids. McCartney is blunt and direct about her own longing and desire (“We fucked like collaborators”) that, in turn, cannot help but seem doomed. It would be almost transgressive if the central character in the poem weren’t herself complicit, if there weren’t blame allocated to both parties. “Lower Muscatine” is a brutal poem, a poem that renders two people as separate as they can be. Poems like these always have consequences. Even the kids are held hostage: a new mother in a poem of the same name with details of childbirth can’t know her child without also knowing that she is now gravid and “craving… the person/ she was before she became/ someone she can’t understand/ without bleeding.” The title poem of Under The Abdominal Wall is about the birth of her son, a surgical procedure, and one might expect that McCartney is just being tough, describing the suture and the invasion first in order to write something in the second half about the beautiful bond with her son. McCartney indeed does write of breastfeeding, but in an enigmatic and rugged way that refuses to offer a pat, warm-n-fuzzy ending. The mother and son instead are “climbing each other,/ like pines treading the timberline, growing/ into gravel and edges.” This is complicated, McCartney is saying, and it will grow more complicated. And yet the love articulated here is fiercer for all that, and demonstrated over several more poems that occupy the central portion of the book and bring us to the family circle: McCartney understands her mother better through her own near-death experience in giving birth.

For most, the rubric of low-risk obstetrics applies: the majority of mothers could give birth on their own without intervention. But for McCartney, her past informs her present; for her, family will never be easy. It is another instance of destiny. McCartney clearly needed to make sense of her experience: ten poems, none of them repetitive, deal with the same event of giving birth, the final poem of the series still blood-soaked but because of the grimness able to give voice to what endures in the final few lines: “it was like coming home,/ like crossing the sill,/ dazed, bleeding,/ longing for the joy/ of arrival.”

Like a good novelist, McCartney plots her collection. We begin with motherhood and death, we move to motherhood tinged with the possibility of death, and then we move to the death of McCartney’s own mother in “Dying, My Mother.” In a delirium the mother thinks she has just given birth in what, if true as anecdote, must have been a kind of hell for the poet. And we must remember the mother who earlier in the book looked at the child and asked “What, after all, do I want,” for the tables are turned in this poem and “Now, she stares/ at me, convinced that I, at least, will tell her/ how she lost that dark/ bundle that purpled/ her legs.” The “after all” finds its apotheosis in this “at least”; McCartney isn’t just caring for her mother, she is once again in the position of having to articulate the history of her own pain and leverage it against the love she has for this person.

Karenin Sings the Blues

If I have mostly dwelt on theme and content thus far, it is because McCartney was still becoming a poet in her first collection: she was turning to first principles, reifying what mattered to her, and getting those things straight was the focus. Under The Abdominal Wall could be thought of as a thematically rich meditation on what it means to lose as a woman, remarkable for its wisdom if not notable for its means. It is in Karenin Sings the Blues that McCartney hits her stride poetically with a longer line and majestic enjambment, trading her earlier stark, harsh terseness for more fluent dexterity, more playful word combinations, a greater flair and showmanship. The words are assembled in iterative waves of phrases. McCartney gives herself more time and room to say a thing, allowing herself the credentials of what Hopkins has called the “in-earnestness of speech,” a style of careening image, still shocking in its primacy but more certain of itself, as in “Frou-Frou, After Vronsky’s ‘Awkward Movement’ at the Last Obstacle of the Steeplechase Breaks Her Back”:

One minute, I’m devouring the course,

flinging fine clods of crescent-shaped

turf up the snouts of the clods who can’t

touch me. The next, his ass down hard

on my spine and I’m shattered, a hammer

to my skull, intact but scattered, shards,

crystals in the shape of a horse.

Stand back and pay attention! the poet is saying. Note the assonance of the first line’s “devouring” and “course,” the heavy, Hughesian consonants of the remainder, the internal rhyme of “shattered” and “scattered,” the end rhyme of “hard” and “shards,” and sundry slant rhymes and alliterations. McCartney pokes her head up out of her relationships and considers the pleasure-seeking audience without sacrificing her trademark kernelized wisdom (bourbon can be as “dark as dismay”) but this wisdom is embedded and is not the sole point of the poetry. Every poem is an expert ventriloquism that lets the poet try on new, fancy clothes.

Consider “Anna’s Morphine,” a poem about an inanimate object (which will become her dominant method in The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder):

I am the fat tongue unlocking her lips,

booted knee scything her snug thighs,

gloved finger that orbits her pursed nipple,

breath on her nape, engine, engendering—

We’re in the realm of the sexual straightaway: the unlocking of lips, the snug thighs, etc. But the “engine” of the poem is the language: the long vowel sounds, the chiming of “lips” with “orbits” and “nipple.” This is a technique of concision, of poetic certainty: the poet has become fascinated with pulse, with kinesis.
But to content for a moment. Though over half of this book is an apocryphal treatment of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the first poem establishes McCartney’s usual pessimistic formula: “If there is a rule of the cosmos,/ it is disappointment, disillusion.” In another poem the Countess Vronsky is made to say “childbirth is the wound that never heals” and in another Kitty calls marriage a “footpath that narrows and wanders” but ultimately “devolves.” McCartney lets the mask slip a little when one of her characters states, “We are more than our bodies. We must be./ If not, what is the purpose of pain?” This is not a moral rhetorical question, a wish that there be some kind of purpose to our instruction; it is, quite simply, a scream. And it’s these feelings that McCartney never loses sight of. In “Seryozha, Anna Karenina’s Son, Many Years Later” McCartney crafts an elegant elegy that could only, I think, have been written by an actual mother. Not a mother who hopes that she has made a mark on her child, that she will be remembered after her death, but a mother who grieves that her child will always be bereft, that the loss of the mother will always be paramount and defining for the child. Seryozha’s is a palpable ache initially beaten into shape by physical detail:

I thought I spotted her in every shuttered

carriage, behind every purple veil, each

solitary figure strolling the colonnades,

her soft round arms in buttoned sleeves…

McCartney is honouring the source text here: by mentioning early Anna’s arms, she invokes the “bare exquisite aristocratic elbow” of Pushkin’s eldest daughter said to have inspired the character in Tolstoy’s mind. The child then recalls how he was told of his mother’s death, and through the grim tutelage of his father he learns

… it was easier

not to look for her….

I called this growing up,

but the truth is I was diminishing.

This is the son who has his mother permanently imprinted, doomed in looking for her (by his disapproving father, and by caretaking a ghost) and doomed in trying to live without her. He is existentially betwixt, and frames his loss in personal terms: his allegiance is somehow not enough of an allegiance. The poem concludes with another of McCartney’s screams, this time a twisting of Wordsworth coming in Seryozha’s self-conception: “The child is father to the fool.” This is not a self-denunciation, not an angry pronouncement; it is an admission of inadequacy, a resignation to doom. It would be far easier for Seryozha to rebel; but as is typical with McCartney, he is inextricably bound. This is the poem of one who has looked on a child and wondered what will be.

The Anna Karenina poems are the best poems of this book. After, Karenin McCartney returns to the fraught realm of motherhood, seemingly never able to know a thing well enough. In “What My Mother Considers Essential” McCartney excoriates herself first (“I move to Seattle, get drunk,/ get pregnant, get an abortion…) and then articulates her mother’s misunderstanding (“When I marry a man she once feared/ and hated, a man she once insisted/ would rape and rob”), but concludes the poem on the plane of domesticity, the only real way of approximating her mother, who doesn’t attend the wedding (this is the classic McCartney family messaging system) but who “sends me a set of stainless steel pots/ and a Teflon baking kit,/ wants to be sure I’m prepared.” What one appreciates in McCartney is not just the eschewal of the holier-than-thou in her self-exposure, but her lack of bitterness in what must have been a cataclysm in her life. These emphatically are not arguments, but rather circular journeys (the poem begins with a little girl practising domesticity, and ends with a woman thrust into it) that orbit her. To return to style for a moment, the formal sophistication McCartney acquired in her Anna Karenina take-offs reverts a little to the shorter-lined, less breathless methodicalness of Under The Abdominal Wall.

The third section of the book, “Persuasion,” again returns to the most formative relationship in McCartney’s life, the one with her mother, but filtered through an Austen prism. There are classic pronouncements (“Did/ she really think happiness could be that easy[?]”) and references to marriage as “a conclusion as final, as boring, as death” that establish the McCartney abacus of human relationships, their recourse to pain. But there is also an admission in “My Mother’s Dresser” that her mother represents a kind of nostalgia, not that pain is welcome but that resolve is. What might have first found its expression in adolescent rebellion – a shouted NO! – has ultimately come round to understanding, as an adult daughter ponders the personal effects of her mother. It would have been much easier for this poet – and there would consequently have been far fewer poems – if she could have merely rejected her mother, but her mother’s acceptance of the worst of circumstances – divorce, dead child – kindles the poet’s wonder. In “Sorry,” the last poem of the collection, she writes “When my mother tried to tell me she was dying,/ tried to shuffle off the frail morphine blanket,/ hallucinations, opiate-induced out-of-the-body/ travels, to reach me, I failed to understand… ” This time it is the longstanding indemnification that finds its ultimate expression as regret in this poem, this exquisite technique of culpability.

The risk of the latter two sections of Karenin is the courting of repetition, the possible overdevelopment of the themes that made Under the Abdominal Wall riveting and formative; but McCartney developed so much as a poet in the intervening period that revisiting these subjects is more like a tentative celebration. The difference is one of apprehending poetic adolescence: the subjects of the first book were hers, but not yet her own, and raw emotional power came to be distilled over time into little devastations, into elegant verbal uppercuts. The family poems that showed promise have here become a deliverance.

The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“[W]hat human inquiry indeed boils down to is the animate interrogating the inanimate. Small wonder that the results are inconclusive…”
—Joseph Brodsky

With her ability to channel characters from literature and jack them up in dizzying exposition, it probably seemed logical for McCartney to do the same with the beloved Little House books from her childhood. But Tolstoy is a much better literary trampoline than Wilder, and even the Karenin poems occupied only a section of a book. There is a creative exhaustion to The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder, a drawn-out, nth-degree sense that the poems started as ideas because they could be done. Though Love Song contains many good poems (“Mary’s Eyes” and “Blackbird in the Corn” particularly stand out), it is minor McCartney, her only dissatisfying outing, borne of a good idea that could not be sustained.

The Little House world is a stand-in for poems about an idyllic childhood that McCartney never had. The first poem is titled “Ma” and this character, rooted in domesticity, is smothered in self-denial. The second poem is about a dead child and a grieving mother. Though there is the same verbal momentum as Karenin McCartney proves that her earlier achievements were no fluke – there is no immediate personal drama. Opting for the dramatization of the personalities of inanimate objects further compounds the difficulty. Only so much can be written about actual characters in the Little House books, forcing McCartney to excavate the inanimate (thirty-two out of a collection of fifty-three poems are odes to objects, and only so much can be made of their collective lament of not being put to good use). It is hard to care for a procession of objects like “Pa’s Big Green Book,” “Uncle George’s Bugle,” or “Ma’s Green Delaine Dress.” In fact the latter poem is uncharacteristically restrained in its staidness. The mystery of the prior two collections, about how a mother can repudiate what makes her human and the effect this repudiation has on her daughter, gets downgraded into the language of the mother’s poverty – a mother who in Karenin would never say the words “love” or “cancer” even though those were the two most powerful forces in her life. It is the daughter, however, who turned out to be the poet, best at ameliorating her fundamental aloneness by relentlessly and painfully connecting her loves. McCartney attempts to infuse life into the poems, as opposed to her more successful and familiar strategy of letting the poems into the life. This backs her into abstraction, grasping at aliveness, as in “Ma’s Rocker,” a poem which finally gives up: “An emptiness carved into me, not/ vacancy, but capacity, designed to hold.” It is hard to think of the rocking chair as truly sentient if it is rendered so imprecisely and with such frantically faux-profound gesturing. Another example of bathos comes in “Churn” which concludes:

The problem is never how to remember,

but how to forget, to transform rawness,

pain, eternal confusion into something

more appetizing, resolve, reconciliation,

the realization that softens winter’s stark

brown loaf, unpalatable potatoes.

The problem is how to write at once abstractly and well. One can try to tether a concept (like remembrance or forgetfulness) with an actual physical entity (odd that this is a poem about an object) but to cram so many concepts into one stanza (nine by my count in six lines) is to overload and ultimately topple the performance into meaning just about anything the reader could want it to mean. Usually McCartney sanctifies the word “pain” in her poems; she almost never misuses it, except here.

But objectification is not the only problem with Love Song. When McCartney does deal with people, her usual strength, the results can be cringe-inducing. Take the title poem, which should bear more scrutiny than, say, a clearly humourous poem about “Pa’s Penis.” McCartney has always had sex as a chief concern in her writing. But the decision to make over Laura Ingalls Wilder as a lesbian in the title poem strikes me as a transgression of the source text. If a writer stays true to her influences, then those influences will see her clear; this poem just perverts the Little House legend unnecessarily. It begins:

Let us go then, Lena and I, on black ponies,

half-wild, bareback, like straddling locomotives,

surging across the prairie steppe, Cossacks,

Fourth of July stunt riders, skirts up,

worsted drawers damp, dappled with horse sweat.

So there is the echo of Eliot’s sexually frustrated Prufrock in the first line that later invokes the sexual symbol of horses and then browbeats us with suggestive imagery like “bareback” and “skirts up” and “drawers damp.” This first stanza sops. But we move from mere suggestion to the travesty of outright enactment:

… Lena comforts, strokes

my forehead same as Ma, asks do I know

what men do to women? Yes, of course.

But do I know how the man lifts the woman’s

muslin shift, like this? Yes Lena. How he

touches her, here, kisses her breasts, nipples,

how tender he is, his tongue? Yes Lena.

At about this moment I think of fidelity to the source material, of the monstrous injection of sex in what was originally a family-rated tale. “Pa’s Penis” is fair game as a poem because it is playful, and because Pa’s heterosexuality is not bent; but this poem is not just impudence, it’s not fair, nor is it earned. Laura Ingalls Wilder is not a central character in this collection despite the title; the poem projects lesbianism on her as the poet’s wet dream. It is more like a Little House girl-on-girl period-porno than a poem. The final affront is an attempt to capture orgasm in the poem’s closing lines:

… I will always remember

how you tasted of granite, of lightning

and thunder, a fiddle string humming.

There should be no such thing as a money shot in verse, unless one wants a Bad Sex award to be created for the poetry category. To insinuate lesbianism into the Little House saga at the last moment, in the last poem, fails as an “update” because so little work has been done to develop the possibility earlier in the book.

Against

McCartney is always coming full circle. Her first book was dedicated to her husband; her last book is about her husband. Against (full disclosure: a book I edited) is a feminine update on Meredith’s Modern Love. It is about what was foretold in Under The Abdominal Wall: the end of the affair, the post-mortem on doomed attachment. The first poem, “Decaf,” admits that something is “ungraspably awry,” that there is “pain” in the poet’s “skull.” The poem then moves on to outright doom: “I thought the end was coming, no way to stop it.” So far, so expected – but then McCartney turns the sense on its ear, speaking of “redemption,” of the “surgeon glancing up/ from the chart, saying no, we were wrong, it’s nothing after all.” This might have been enough distance to cover, McCartney could have ended here on the hopeful note, but instead she fuses both senses, and both are true in the closing line of the poem – when poets are at their most conscious: “the blade bites deeper, and realizing you are married to him.” This poem admits defeat, admits that defeat will always be felt in terms of pain, and this awareness informs the rest of the collection.

McCartney cares less about extrication from a disaster than preserving the memory of what was once a great love. For all her emotional morbidity, McCartney doesn’t favour pain over love. No, her great redemption is the blade behind that pain, that deeper bite. In a later poem she is abject: “Weakness, weakness, how impossible/ it is to will oneself into or out of love.” But even so overcome by emotion she can’t help but commemorate the feeling, again in the fully conscious and quailing last lines of “Remains of the Day”:

… Because, at the end,

nothing will remain but that, watching you

leave, almost unable to breathe, my body

a gutted mansion, galleries stripped, barren.

This is another scream, a scream of abandonment, a still shot of a loving woman utterly rent by failure. Not for nothing does this poet – for whom motherhood has been the chief subject – close the poem with what must have been the hardest epithet of all.

If anything, the longer line introduced in Karenin is often drawn out into a drawl in Against, it’s finessed and sussed and allowed to tumble. The style is meant to reflect a compendium of event and emotion, the two being inseparable. Consider “Against Skinny-Dipping”:

… then it dies, the good feeling,

the talk turning to getting naked, what a lark it will be, relentless,

revisiting wheres and whens, beaches, baths. I hate this. Can’t

undress for anyone, every disaster torched on my body in scars.

So fucked to be that. I see what’s ahead, a mixed-up weekend

of hurt, every mild sorrow tumbled at my feet like sour clothing,

looking away while three pale immortals mount the surf.

Because this is a collection of retrospect, where events are found to resonate in memory (the poem is here-and-now, but McCartney has already experienced the end of the affair), the lines themselves must possess a sense of time. McCartney is paradoxically rushing to express something that happened long ago. The poems are comma-rich crammings, with multiple collisions and pauses for breath. But Against also has variety. McCartney can be precise, as in “A Relationship,” short enough to be quoted in its entirety:

Though the old cat both fears and detests

the dog, she wants the warmth of the room.

The dog curled beside me, the rest of the house

unheated. She hooks a claw under the door,

then thins herself to slip through the crack.

Pauses on the rug beside the bed, staring

at us, alarmed. If the dog moves,

she jumps, imagines he means harm.

But he’s just preparing to leave.

Cats are “feminine,” and this one is even referred to as a “she.” The dog is a “he.” This is a poem of wariness, of alarm, embodied in the behaviour of the cat. But the dog isn’t just incidental to the cat’s distress, nor is the cat hysterical; it’s the fact that the dog will leave that is the actual harm. Obvious parallels to the human principals of Against aside, here we have stylistically a rather spare, unadorned description of a domestic scene. So McCartney can be in free-associative agony, but she can also be possessed of cold appraisal.

Like many breakups, hers was stuttering. In “After Little Italy” there’s not quite reconciliation, rather persistent need: “You’re/ a little bewildered; first, I want out, then, I want sex. Forget/ what I said.” Or in “Against Sanitation,” another carnal plea, the speaker wants her husband not to clean himself after a hockey game: “… don’t rinse it away, come home to me with your ignominious/ arm-pits, your skunky rancor, truculence, your love of violence and/ force, your putrid, decaying-from-the-inside leather-of-the-glove stench/ of your fingers as they enter me…” And in “Impending Death of the Cat,” a near-perfect sonnet, it appears the decision to end the marriage has not been made yet, but like the terminal illness of the cat, it looms. Despite the recourse to words like “food” and “shit” and “vomit” there’s still that bundle of longing and grace in perhaps the most devastating reversal of a couplet I’ve seen: “And yet, remark her purr, her carriage,/ how capably she embodies the state of our marriage.” It is this gift, this ability to cherish, that keeps McCartney ethically clean: this is not a First-Wives-Club enumeration of grievances (in one poem she concludes that there is “no blame to shed but my own”) but rather a reclamation effort, a deep-sea salvage. Whole poems can be devoted to the simple moments when people connect, when they know each other carnally and existentially, as in “Lady Ashley”:

What stays with me now is not his ardor,

his matador’s grip, but the laughter when

he paused, inside me at last, and we locked

eyes, focussed—oh it’s you!— like the moment

when you unwrap a gift…

Irving Layton once wrote that poets are always on the tightrope between sex and death, but that major poets dance on the rope whereas the minor poets tentatively just make it across. A poem like “Dorothy” about sex with the Tin Man (Forget the heart, I tell him. What you’ve got is way better) demonstrates McCartney’s jazz hands. McCartney’s death in this collection is metaphorical, but her sex is present and realized and without it there would be no credible counterpoint. Whereas Love Song is a compendium of objects protesting that they have feelings, Against is replete with wounded human feelings that find salvation in their welcome remembrance. McCartney utters her retrospective post-marriage ethos in “Against Form”:

my mother’s subtracted

future laid out for her at twenty, a floral arrangement,

funereal tones deepening as it dried. Anything

but that.

Which is basically saying that she got what she wanted, that rebellion against her mother was a proxy way of adopting her mother’s definition. By aligning herself “against,” she merely becomes an inverse of her mother – one could switch the numerator and denominator and have the same being; she is not different. Later in the poem she chooses “pain,” that word again, as a way to “see what befalls.” McCartney’s mother did her poet-daughter the supreme favour: she bid her to feel, to feel it all, and these feelings are what give McCartney’s poems a beating heart. The title is ironic: McCartney clearly isn’t against form, she’s just desperately trying to be against type. And it is certainly ironic amidst this torrent that her most emotionally controlled poem – paradoxically one of the most affecting – is a geometric construction. Here’s the opening of “Against Parallelism”:

The sadness, two vectors, equidistant,

soldiering along side-by-side, in tandem,

but separate. The most microscopic gap

equals an abyss, unbridgeable. Why

doesn’t one or the other veer off?

Change course? End it?

They’ll never meet—

This is the tragedy of incompatibility, all the more remarkable because McCartney is a poet of connectivity. This poem of separateness is the starkest kind of devastation, recalling Marvell’s “The Definition of Love” and its lines

As lines, so love’s oblique, may well

Themselves in every angle greet :

But ours, so truly parallel,

Though infinite, can never meet.

This allusion leads to the more emotion-inflected ecapitulation of “Sixteen Years Ago”: “Ridiculous, wasn’t it,/ to think I could bank on love?” But the rejoinder is that she sought it out, in fact couldn’t have done anything else. It is perhaps fallacious to introduce the concept of poetic destiny, to pontificate about a poet and what they were meant to say, but McCartney was in many respects made. She draws us in through knowingness, which for her is a mirror of self-awareness. It is good that love has never made her feel safe, that it was a levy and not a boon, because it is human nature to appreciate more the things we pay for. Even though the results may be too costly, there is always the matter of the search for a decision, the ability of the poet to take solace from choice, or, as she says in “Against Marriage”: “craving… a pain that belongs to no one but me.” This is a line that foreshadows a later poem’s realization that there is no use in “trying to love/ what he loved so that he would love me more./ And that/ not working.” McCartney’s grief is invited to the table of poetry, the discomfiture of her art becoming ours.