By Henry Walters

Time and again, Alice Fogel’s poems’ subtractions have a purifying effect, showing us a landscape or an architecture we hadn’t guessed was there.

Falsework by Alice Fogel. Bee Monk Press, 92 pp., $15.

Falsework, the new book of poems from Alice Fogel, former New Hampshire Poet Laureate, takes its title from a mostly unseen form of architecture: the temporary structures required to create larger, self-sustaining forms in their place. In the construction of a dome, for example, the falsework includes a hemispherical forest of trusses and supports, all of which, on completion of the dome, disappear into thin air.

Many of Fogel’s poems refine the art of building through subtraction. The opening poem, “The Infinite,” is a kind of introductory course in disassembly; from its initial text, ever-slenderer variations are extracted, one nested in the next, like Russian dolls. In this iterative sequence, the lines “an infinite frame / finishing the moment of time” become “an infinite frame / finishing time” and finally, “an infinite / finish.” The beauty here lies in the fact that each poem’s “finish” is not a polishing or a sealing tight, but a cracking open, an emptying out. The deletions not only widen the scope of “the infinite,” they yield room for light to enter, for the poem to become habitable. The reader is invited to step in.

The formal process of distillation also amounts to a purifying of subject matter. Here, if nowhere else, the circus of our distractable world seems to have been sifted to its essentials: the day to its daylight, the river to its current, Occam to his razor, Saturn and its 62 moons to a bit of “galactic     wind in a mirror.” If you have ever wondered what the bedrock, the brass tacks of our lives look like, here they are, our earthly materials, but seen as if from a height, at a scale where they become comprehensible, and hence valuable:

 

    What if what you had will be

from a distance

     clear though it had been

up close

    indecipherable

 

Time and again, the poems’ subtractions have this purifying effect, showing us a landscape or an architecture we hadn’t guessed was there. But just as often the same magic happens by addition, by extracting something from nothing, the greater from the less: the most empty emptiness gets populated with “extraplanetary petals / of dust,” and that dust itself gets “blown […] back into the vaster gathering.”

The entirety of Falsework is braided from these two competing strands, twinned and twining: of plus and minus, space and emptiness, foreground and background, the dome and the space it holds (and is held by). By the time we reach the last poem in the book, “The Fringe,” which builds itself from nothing before our very eyes, in fitting counterpoint to “The Infinite,” that reversal of form feels both inevitable and incredible, as if we were watching St. Peter’s go up before our eyes in a few seconds of time-lapse video.

While we may recognize, in the visual arts, the ways in which Escher and other illusionists turn figure into ground and ground into figure, oscillating between two perspectives, this book does what only a musical art can do: make them both present to the senses simultaneously. The figure makes the ground, and the ground makes the figure. “Falsework,” the title poem, doesn’t just take that knotty koan for its subject, it enacts it:

 

When I said I’ll cast my fate to the winds I thought of domes

built of brick & mortar laid over falsework,

that false name for what supports the only chance for a dome to be

a feat of grace […]

 

“I said…I thought…I said…I thought”: these individual stair-steps, trowel-taps, move us ever upward in one smooth arc toward a height where all our dualities — life/death and earth/heaven and one/many and zero/one and me/not-me — meet and join. What moves us is not an illusory synthesis but the music of the poem’s own architecture, the way it shapes the air, makes it breathable and speakable. A reader quickly becomes attuned to line-ends and caesuras not as gaps in sound or breaks in thought, but as generative spaces in which what follows is actively being invented, being formed. They seem to hold a place for the reader, as if our response were the poems’ fulfillment: rather than trying to hold the floor, sum it all up, have the last word, they leave room for the reader’s echo.

These subjects and methods are not new to the poet. Earlier books such as Be That Empty and Interval show Fogel working in this same rich soil over the course of decades. Perhaps time is what gives Falsework its particular feeling of distillation, its voice and form always in easy equilibrium, spacious and light as risen bread. Behind the metaphor of architecture stands not more immortal architecture, but the mortally human, whose shifting origins and destinies are our one constant home. The truest poems are not built but live their own lives—beside us, in us, and us in them.

 

what’s imagined long & well    already

    settles into memory

like everything      that grows    that casts

    shadow or falls

 

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Henry Walters is the author of two books of poetry: Field Guide A Tempo, a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and The Nature Thief, published in 2022 by The Waywiser Press. He is also the translator from Italian of Enrico Testa’s Ablativo, winner of the 2013 Premio Viareggio. His work appears in periodicals such as The Threepenny Review, Orion, Raritan, Literary Imagination, The Yale Review, and New Letters. He lives in New Hampshire with his young family, a hawk, and a hive of bees.