From the Foreword by William Olsen
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The shape-shifting realms of longing are fitful setting for local genius. But here, in Lisa Fishman's beautiful first collection of poems, is where for the love of the world we find ourselves. As a reader, I could say I see in these poems a devotion approaching to love, if love ever stayed still enough to take a linguistic reading of. The poet sees much more, though. There's possibly no harder stance for the young poet to take up than one of love and longing -- Richard Hugo used to adjure his students to put off writing their first love poem until they were fifty -- but there is no more tempting subject either, and Lisa Fishman is not a poet who contents herself to live out as truth the easy injunctions from the Fathers or the Mothers. Besides , as she writes in "V's Farmhouse," "no one ever died of desire." That's a witty line. It's a line that puts the brakes on the aesthetics of death-wish Romance; and, like all of Fishman's effortless seeming assertions, if feels thought out and lived in. As wit goes, and in poetry it too often goes fast and furious and blind, this line has, to quote another father, a self-appointed one, T.S. Eliot, a "tough reasonableness beneath the lyric grace."

Fishman's poems get at their hard subjects and their scarcely inhabitable places by owning up to their own loves, and their duplicities, and their split-second sidetrackings. Through intelligence, unashamed, unnerved intelligence -- she is a new-metaphysical poet, one thoroughly conversant in the theory of our time -- and through a responsive pliant syntax that never quite breaks. Her poems are tough reeds in the purgatorial wind. There are a growing number of young poets who have figured a way out of the purportedly image-based, purportedly plain speech, purportedly sincerist poetry of a few decades ago, and that's a good thing, as there's always room in Parnassus for dazzle and flair and smart talk. And for all the puritanical mispractices of a new aesthetic correctness, it is also about time that we started distrusting the colonizing impulses of our language. But what too often happens out of collective wisdom is a poetry that, in the hopes of righting itself, goes so far into its prospectus that it begins to mistake its intentions for moral accomplishments, and then it begins to condescend to its own past. So the rich dialogue of poetry becomes reduced to a dialogue of art with art, and we end up in that place below purgatory that George Oppen calls "the no world of artyness." Yet this is a rich time for poetry, too: witness, here is one more unsettled traveler.

Unsettled in fact, in mind and in heart. Fishman's poems seem to have endless riches and eccentric offerings at their reach. Probably there is a quality in any successful poem that always seems found, its poet gift-ed by its offerings by being given over to them, and Fishman's poems have more than their share of the glories of experience. Which is to say they have very little to count on, yet very much to take account of: they have a speaker whose father sends her a third of his earnings and comes home "carrying all that money/ that never even felt like his." They have visits home at summer and a hammock that blows like "a little boat/ of ropes in the wind." An oblivious lover "pissing a long arc into the sumac and Queen Anne's lace" who "didn't eve n have to leave the room." They keep their humor in their real travels to the inextricably mixed and constantly re-evolving frontier lands of the global culture, as to an Italy where "In Rome a priest named Vladimar pronounced my name in Portuguese." Th ey have a speaker driving closer and closer to home but not so close as all that: "I'm driving home through Couer d'Alene, the road like a waltz lurching forward on its one bad knee." They have, constellating around their poet, fellow travelers to equal ly deceptive, equally longed-after realms, as a Major General one brief century away from us who finds his sole bearings in his journal, in which he writes, just like one of us moderns might, "As the sun rose today I looked out upon -- what shall I say, t he lake?"

And at bottom, in the journeys of these poems charged by the prospect of getting somewhere, Fishman acknowledges what's at stake, what the real cost is -- that the danger of being lost is losing a sense of where we once were, which is also where we are, and which to see long enough to get into words takes a steady eye, and not just an art rising from the ashes of a junked tradition, but a self-critical art.

Fishman's poems offer many pleasures, and if these pleasures prove sometimes to be difficult ones, this is only because Fishman forces her art out into the neglected world where difficulties really begin. Yet these are also internal, tremendously internal poems. Internality in poetry often turns out to be the vanishing point of the world, but not in these poems. Their interests -- the poets' fractured family, her distant relations, saints and artist-saints including Stravinsky and the great Czech photographer Joseph Sudek, the desert reaches of Utah, the boggy waterlands of Michigan -- are only as diffuse as human curiosity at its most engaged is diffuse. So the poems are true, inwardly focused, but outwardly transfixed. The urgency of their thoughtliness suggests that whatever current comforts of theory we affix ourselves to, theory is not the to-die-for of intelligence but the dream that precedes the to-live-for of reality. In short these poems try only anything that works, including poetry: It is to figures of speech that we return.

My heart is on fire, we say
or, her love rides like the wind.
Is it exactitude we seek, or the rain
to sail its ships down our backs.

It is wondrous that these poems so often find, in their moments of truest perplexity, ecstatic outreach. Fishman may be dissatisfied with her art, but she is never dismissive, never coy; and when she allows herself transport, it is transport back to some where just as needful of our care as the last poor place we found ourselves. Here are the last stanzas of Ave Maria, a "love" poem -- a poem that spans the natural world and contemporaneity and a not-so-distant time of medieval monks in prayer. It is a poem that in its crosscuts from one dark age to the next bids a wary invitation to the future, tendering its numbered desires as echoes of innumerable continuities:

The car glides like an egg through the centuries falling around it,

but the voices merge, singing.
It's 1297. Stone gates,

cobblestone. Where shall we lay our weary heads
if the story holds them together like peas in a pod,

like a hand in a glove: will they ever stop singing,
is their world without end?

Salt streaks the car and a mule deer waits for the lights
to stop blinding. ( It's not that I want to leave -- )

But what they are singing is not about love.
It's about wanting the story, driving all night

and waiting for someone
to say, that man

or, this woman
is mine .

Any expectation we have of possessing the desired is, alas, as these last lines sing without disguise, going to get us into trouble. Trouble that this poet gets beyond only by passing through it, to something like understanding. That something is all there is, and it -- and this fine debut -- is rare passage, indeed. --William Olsen