For a Zach Savich book, it’s best if you start by comparing that sensitive part of your palm to its more capable utility. Like if you need to lift something off the floor, this part of your palm would be right where the lifting happened. But it’s also where your fortune lies when a palm reader lightly touches it to see into your future. Savich’s poems are useful like that. They are sensational and labor-ready. They have occupied whatever the given moment, and they’ve softened it, and the language relates that softer understanding. Language is a rhetorical hibiscus flower for Savich. A consistent resource. A poetic massaging.
And I have to admit, I like this book more than the previous books I’ve ready by him. But it’s only because I was selfish when reading those previous books. I understand the his poetic position relies on brevity. There is only so much time to be afforded the moment before any poem loses its its authentic grasp on the moment. I always felt Savich was masterful in phrasing and sharpness of detail. And then he would let go too soon. The poems in Momently embrace brevity still; however, the poems each take up about as much time as would be committed to a sonnet. I would almost like to argue it is a series of “meditative but probing” (the jacket copy describing the poems) sonnets. And maybe that’s because there’s this general belief that the sonnet is the perfect length for a poem. Yes, Savich has found his perfect poem length for one of his most admiring readers (me!).
There’s a lot to the poems that would recommend reviewing this book in those terms. Especially how similar the poems’ language is to those sonnets I appreciate by Gerard Manly Hopkins, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Mathias Svalina. Though I’d subtract the overwhelming devotion those sonnet writers might use in their work. Savich’s poems are more ruminative, like the Terrance Hayes poems that were like drinking cold fresh water. But their frames are more domesticated. Meaning the entire range of subject matter you might map out from a word like “home,” especially a home that seems on the edge of the suburbs, looking out at a pastoral landscape, that catalogue will likely be discovered in reading these poems. Using a tense language that arbitrarily mediates between you, the poet, and all these domesticated objects that fill the landscape of that countryside you see.
In the corner of that scene you might see Zach Savich holding a shepherd’s crook, waiting to describe this world to you. One of his specialties is the poetic moment that consider an object from both inside and out, or from both the contrary and its entirely present presentation. Perhaps you appreciate the poem that maneuvers the reader. Discursively shifting them from one line of thought to the next. Savich is ready for you! His three stanza structure operates like a Petrarchan sonnet. Offering first one perspective. Shifting to an alternative perspective that may or may not feel rooted to the original one. But with the final stanza, you’ll feel the swoop of recognition. Or if it’s not immediately apparent consider the might-ness of it being there. Because you’ll assuredly feel the right-ness that all these things absolutely belong! In one poem, together!!
Perhaps, though, you’re more interested in how far Savich can take you into the depths of domestic poeticness. The inside of a house morphing into the inside of an apartment morphing into a photograph that catches the view from a window looking out at the clothesline. That’s not a precise image you’ll find in this book. But you will find that sensation of domestic portability. Maybe a stone was a universal language for inexplicable gravity in Deep Image poets of the 1970s. Zach Savich is ready for you with Deep Image 2.0 (or whatever version number it is in the 2020s)! These poems have that feeling of presence and activity and wherewithal that fills a home with all things domestic. Think of that charged complexity you feel thinking about home, about going home, about who’s ever lived with you in a home, about the home you’re making now and how it might compare to the home you were living in as a young adult. Savich’s poems are about being alive, at home, where someone needs to water the basil. And just as you’re thinking of that a series of impressions fill your mind, like a mist that’s dense and firm, about as firm as the palm of your hand. That is the both what Savich’s poems are and what they feel like reading them.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.