Property Paperback – May 1, 2008

Julie Agoos's latest book of poems, "Property," is an extraordinary narrative concerned with telling a story about property and the horrors it has provoked over hundreds of years in the New England in which she grew up. Focusing on a quasi-mythical, yet particularized town, probably in New Hampshire, she constructs a picture of our culture with details of old violence on American soil-as far back as the Pequot War of 1637 and the interesting tale of a young American girl (of European descent), captured by Indians, who, given the choice, remains with her captors. But the story is centered on a crime of arson and gratuitous murder fueled by racism and hatred in the present. The center section of the narrative is the transcript of the trial with depositions of the town inhabitants, who serve as character witnesses or witnesses to the crime. Their accounts piece together for us only a partial explanation of the events through their revelations of the background of the actors in the gruesome murders. But how, Agoos asks, can we ever hope to know the real story whose origins are buried in the twisted values of this culture? Although her writing is often plain and stark, fitting the dark places of the soul from which the ugliness springs, there is a beauty in its severity. Her images and dramatic dialogue shock the reader into recognition of the hatred and brutality of which humans are capable. Agoos's poetry has always revealed her acute ability to see the world's surfaces and its corresponding depths. Her idiosyncratic sensibility invites us to look with her. Take, for example, the first "land portrait" in "Above the Land," her award-winning "Yale Series of Younger Poets" debut volume of 1986:...the whole hill falls like an immense parcel wrapped in the same green paper I've seen stored in your house- that Cuban lime color.Or an impressionistic scene, that might easily serve as script directions from an Antonioni movie, from "Florence's Interlude" of the same collection:At noon, on the stair's elbow, the light falls, and soon each pair of pensioners comes down the walls darkening with their shadows.In "Franklin" she references some of the same events we learn of in Property: "Mrs. Phillip Call-scalped / by Indians, her family kidnaped / in the early years of purpose." But here the almost incidental detail is an item in a series meant to sharpen a composite picture of a town instead of its serving the thematic and integrated purpose of her latest work. Plato was wrong to banish poets from his ideal democracy. If Julie Agoos and her peers were senators and heads of state, the world would be the better for it.