MANUAL OF WOODY
PLANTS
Phil Cordelli. Ugly Duckling Presse, $14 paperback
(184p) ISBN 978-1-937027-21-6
If I'm allowed to be a bit superficial to start, and
dammit I am, I have to say that this book, as an object, is gorgeous. The cover
is a smooth rustic brown paper printed with a clean olive-green design, cut
perfectly flush with the pages it binds. It is so well-made, I cared for this book's well-being. Ugly
Duck Press deserves whatever buzz they get if they produce pieces of this
quality, especially for limited runs.
Phil Cordelli's Manual
of Woody Plants is a puzzle, but not one that's meant to be solved. I am
the first to admit that my taste in reading, especially in poetry, may be more
conservative than many. When encountering the work of poets who seem to embrace
the language school of poetry's bafflingly loose regard for form, grammar and
syntax, I feel that I lack the training and the vocabulary to properly appreciate
what I am reading. And, well, I like grammar and syntax, it seems such a shame
to me when it is deliberately eschewed. Yet I refuse to dismiss Cordelli's Manual so easily, because this is
clearly a book that was carefully written, and any rule that he breaks, he does
so with obvious intent.
Ostensibly formatted as a sort of field journal, Manual is organized by plant type
(Decidious, Coniferous, Pines, Shrubs, etc), and each poem is a plant's
scientific name in Latin. Every entry approaches its title differently; some
are basically descriptive poems, detailing the plant subject in a lyrical
fashion. Other poems use the title as a jumping off point for some personal
memory, or other topic. There are various sketches and doodles interspersed
throughout the book, marginalia that one would find in an actual field journal,
lending to the illusion.
Most of Cordelli's poems are disjointed in some
fashion, rarely does one line follow into the next without some unexpected
indentation, punctuation, or mid-word caesura. He hints at his process in the
acknowledgments, some combination of collage, cropping, rearranging, and
remixing. A less explicit, but perhaps more meaningful explanation of his
technique is found in Aesculus
hippocastanum: “This is how I would rewrite it:/ poke holes underneath each
letter/ and breathe through them”.
I hear that breath throughout this book. I recommend
reading several poems in a sitting, allowing the sounds of the words to take
the fore. Cordelli's voice is rich and varied, the phonemes he chooses come off
of the tongue like rounded berries (“striped tendon to the slopes”), giving
even the most inscrutable poems an incredible texture. In some places, he acts
as a curator, appropriating found texts to highlight something new. I love the
complex history buried in this line from Liriodendron
Tulipifera (Tuliptree), which he presumably borrowed from a historical
marker in some park: “It [the tuliptree] was, until its death in 1933 at the
age of 280 years, the last living link with the Reckgawawang Indians who lived
here”. It takes artistry to recognize that, and know to put it in a book. Other
poems skew more traditional, such as Prunus
serotina (Cherry), which is like his version of a haiku:
Blossoms
are falling
against
what we take
to
be clouds. Shades
are
beginning to be
drawn.
Still there are other poems that are entirely
unrecognizable to me, that are deconstructed beyond anything that I would recognize
as a poem – I'm not convinced a series of backslashes can be considered a
stanza. Hell, I don't even know what a backslash sounds like. My suspicion is
that my hard-to-ignore impulse to understand them is the very reason why I will
never truly understand them.
No matter, though, because I can pick and choose
what I like and there are a lot of things in Manual of Woody Plants that I like very much indeed. I don't need
to completely parse this phrase:
there's a difference between feeling
(the clouds)
and ascension
to know that it has meaning.
(October 2013)
Purchase Manual
of Woody Plants HERE.
Reviewer bio: Tom Taff lives and works in Saint
Paul, Minnesota.
