Reviewed by Abigail Holstein
5.26.07

Eliza Griswold’s first collection of poetry, Wideawake Field, is the story of an affair. It is a geographic affair, a professional affair: She is a reporter-poet, and her poems visit Afghanistan and the Congo, and the people and places she calls home. Writing about these far away places, she conveys the abandon and resignation inherent in a powerful tryst, while loneliness and disillusionment mark her return to the familiar embrace of home. Her poems explore how the unfamiliar, chaotic, and violent can be more of a home than home itself. She never reveals the “why” in her poems, or the “how”—how, specifically, this affair came to be, or why it persists. She asks in “Evolution,” for example, “Was it dissatisfaction or hope/ that beckoned some of the monkeys/ down from the trees?” But she concludes for the monkeys and for herself, that “…movement/ is awkward. The lesson is fumble.” The struggle inherent in her affair yields an uncertain space where anything is possible: “There are tigers above/ and below. Let us love/ one another and let go.”

Griswold’s foreign and familiar subjects are drawn with broad strokes of mood and memory. In “October,” she describes an American autumn: “The chairs have come in/…the crisp yellow thwock/ of the ball being hit.” More than the seasonal activities of playing ball and taking in the summer furniture, the poem is defined by its final lines:

I’m a memory of myself.
My whole old life—
I mourn you sometimes
in places you would have been.

Her isolation from the homey images recasts the poem in sadness and longing—the change of season is not merely being remembered as something familiar, but it is being mourned, and Griswold looks back from a distance, alone. In a poem set far from “October,” she writes,

On the western ghats of the city,
children are bathing,
husbands are burning their wives.
The river, resigned, takes everyone in.”

Even though she is only a witness, Griswold is connected to the scene, and “our mother,/ squatting to wash”—as a fellow human, one among hundreds at the river’s edge. Like the river, she is “resigned” and “takes everyone in” as both the chaotic scene before her and the inherent relationship of humanity overwhelm her.

As Griswold transverses the globe throughout the collection, she redefines home and away with her alternate expressions of belonging and dislocation. In foreign lands, she is swept into situations of turmoil, violence and danger so profoundly uncontrollable that she becomes complicit in them. In “Foreign Correspondence,” she writes, “A child coughs…The walls are thinner here./ I woke to the sound of a man/ beating his wife.” The beating wakes her and brings her explicitly into the world of the poem, under the same roof as the coughing child. The inescapable proximity of the people in the house makes it a home, and Griswold’s cool tone suggests a certain comfort, or, like the river in “Clean,” resignation.

Conversely, the overpowering force of connection she finds in the foreign is missing from her poems about the familiar, and these poems find Griswold both lamenting and resenting its absence. In “Pennant” she writes,

Love was the illusion,
the tent on the beach
…that said you’re never alone.
The tent is gone.
It takes you days to notice.

Love disappears, and with it, a “slip of bright everlasting” that once pretended “to be home.” While Griswold watches these disappearances, she also watches her lover’s failure to notice any change: “The last night comes./ The bald dunes sleep.” The sense of abandonment runs thick through the poem, but love is, from the start, an illusion, as is the connection between Griswold and her lover. In other words, she is always alone, even when she is in “Love.” Similarly, in “Sadness,” she writes, “On the way home,/ I bought my husband a seascape…No sadness in it anywhere.” The gesture of the gift is suggestively as void of emotion as the relationship itself. The seascape and the disappearing tent on the beach both reveal a startling disconnect in these supposedly deep, personal relationships.

But the tension between Griswold's experiences of the familiar and the foreign yields an almost carefree pleasure. Although clearly not content with the familiar, she is far from elated with the foreign. The push and pull each exerts on her life leads her to see that, as she writes in "Beyond the Solace of a Devastated Landscape": "if you hurl/ yourself at chaos/ chaos will catch you." In its embrace, she finds moments like this one in the title poem:

Let us tumble.
Let us laugh at our grip.
If these are last days
let them not catch us sleeping
but awake in this field, and ready.

Between the forcefulness of the wide world and the disappointments of home, Griswold discovers light in their darkness, a halo of space in which satisfaction, even happiness, is possible. Together, those few moments in those few poems hardly amount to an explanation of Griswold's affair, and she does not present them as such. Rather, in the hold of the foreign and the familiar, they are the only moments one would hope to find in an affair—release and joy.