Celestial Timepiece

By Joyce Carol Oates

New York: Ecco, 2021
112 Pages

A new collection of poetry from an American literary legend, her first in twenty-five years.

Joyce Carol Oates is one of our most insightful observers of the human heart and mind, and, with her acute social consciousness, one of the most insistent and inspired witnesses of a shared American history.

Oates is perhaps best known for her prodigious output of novels and short stories, many of which have become contemporary classics. However, Oates has also always been a faithful writer of poetry. American Melancholy showcases some of her finest work from the last couple of decades.

Covering subjects big and small, and written in an immediate and engaging style, this collection touches on both the personal and the political. Loss, love, and memory are investigated along with the upheavals of our modern age; the reality of our current predicaments; and the ravages of poverty, racism, and social unrest. Oates skillfully writes characters ranging from a former doctor at a Chinese Peoples’s Liberation Army hospital to Little Albert, a six-month-old infant who took part in a famous study that revealed evidence of classical conditioning in human beings.

Contents

I.
The Coming Storm

In Hemp-Woven Hammocks Reading the Nation
Exsanguination
Little Albert, 1920
Harlow’s Monkeys
Obedience: 1962
Loney
The Coming Storm
Edward Hopper’s “Eleven A.M.,” 1926

II.
The First Room

The First Room
Sinkholes
That Other
The Mercy
The Blessing
This Is not a Poem
Apocalypso

III.
American Melancholy

To Marlon Brando in Hell
Too Young to Marry But Not Too Young to Die
Doctor Help Me
Old America Has Come Home to Die
Jubilate: An Homage in Catterel Verse
Kite Poem
American Sign Language
Hometown Waiting For You

IV.
“This Is the Time . . .”

Hatefugue
A Dream of Stopped-Up Drains
Bloodline, Elegy
Harvesting Skin
“This is the Time for Which We Have Been Waiting”
The Tunnel
Palliative

Excerpt

This Is not a Poem

in which the poet discovers
delicate white-parched bones
of a small creature
on a Great Lake shore
or the desiccated remains
of cruder road-kill
beside the rushing highway.

Nor is it a poem in which
a cracked mirror yields
a startled face,
or sere grasses hiss-
ing like consonants
in a foreign language.
Family photo album
filled with yearning
strangers long-deceased,
closet of beautiful
clothes of the dead.
Attic trunk, stone well
or metonymic moon
time-traveling for wisdom
in the Paleolithic
age, in the Middle Kingdom
or Genesis
or the time of Basho . . . .

Instead it is a slew
of words in search
of a container—
a sleek green stalk,
a transparent lung,
a single hair’s curl,
a cooing of vowels
like doves.

Awards

• Best American Poetry 2017: “To Marlon Brando in Hell”
• Best American Poetry 1991: “Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, 1942”

Reviews

Publishers Weekly, December 21, 2020, page 59

In urgent and unsettling poems that question national mythology, Oates (Tenderness) brings her talent as a storyteller and powers of observation to bear on a variety of American characters and institutions. . . . Written with mournful and harrowing clarity, this collection reveals an America grown accustomed to cruelty and forgetting.

Barbara Egel, Booklist, February 1, 2021

In her poetry, as in her fiction, Oates is not especially concerned with her readers’ comfort, though her goal is far larger than discomfiture for its own sake. . . . Oates concentrates her powerfully unnerving sensibility into poems that challenge and haunt.

Library Journal, February 2021, pages 86-87

We do not think of poetry as Oates’s genre; she is so cherished and prolific in prose, especially fiction (e.g., A Book of American Martyrs), that it is difficult to recall that she has always taken an interest in the field, as both critic and writer. . . . Oates’s high profile as a novelist should not discourage avid poetry readers from seeking out this volume, which aptly demonstrates the writer’s gifts in the genre and includes several poems of the highest quality.

Image: Approaching Thunder Storm by Martin Johnson Heade, 1859