AN ABUNDANCE OF CAUTION

Witte surveys our apocalyptic times in this poetry collection.

The title of this collection became a kind of slogan during the Covid pandemic. Simultaneously evoking the variable danger of the virus and the uncertain institutional response to it, the newly ubiquitous phrase heralded a suspension of normal life, explaining why we must no longer go near one another. As the speaker riffs in the title poem, “Proceed as if on shattered glass / around suspicious passersby / eyeing each other’s mask and gloves, / give way or cross the street devoid / of traffic, nowhere to commute, / on holiday but isolate.” Rather than presenting such furtiveness as a freakish deviation from the normal, the author suggests that these behaviors are more or less par for the course; in his view, humans tend toward defensiveness, reticence, hesitancy, and self-isolation. “Necks bow in unison, / alone,” begins “Who What When Where Why”; “At church or phone / in urgent prayer, awaiting / word: when and where / dread happens.” “Reap” begins in a damning, near-biblical register: “We sing what we have sown low voices hushed / in hope and shame before whatever ear / might listen in excuses salting praise / as meat is seasoned to devour as we / devour our kind…” There’s an omniscience to the poems that allows the speaker to fade into the background. Witte seems more interested in writing about the collective than the specific individual; in these poems, people are specters, shadows, whispers, shuffling forms who crowd and dissipate, witness and conspire. They move in a landscape dotted with the husks of cicada nymphs, dead birds, decapitated snakes, and underfed zoo animals. The apocalypse is here, brought on not so much by dystopian technology or a ravaged climate as by our own inability to be with one another.

The lacuna-filled verses read—in the best way—like they were written 80 years ago. The poet’s incredible attention to image and rhythm and insistence upon the exact right word create an incantatory sense of inevitability. In “Back of the Napkin,” the speaker delivers some climate math in a latter-day Domesday Book: “Assuming seven years the balance / tips both poles collapse so / oceans fall like hungry ghosts / upon our grain and property / then figure fifty give or / take’s when nothing stays sun / surveilling what it lasers off / infernos roam the highland….” It’s a slightly antiquated, modernist sensibility, but it perfectly captures something of the very recent past—the late Trump/early Covid era. When a more individualized speaker appears in the book’s final section, the reader has a sense that it’s too late, that everything has already been lost. There’s a historian’s resignation to it all, a sense that the last man is scribbling down the final observations about a civilization on the brink of collapse: “Above damp sand trash whirls like restless souls. / Warm humid afterbreath floods ventricles / with suffocating ease. I think we’re done.”

An era-encapsulating collection of stylish, deftly composed poems.