Sherod Santos’ tenth collection, The Burning World, is an extended meditation on conflicts ranging from martial to internal, involving everything from globalism and technology to classical literature. Various metaphors and devices reincorporate and complicate throughout the sequence, allowing us to see into the psychological subtleties at their roots.
“Having Already Invented the Greeks,” opens on a shifting foundation, reminding us that Western cultural roots, supposedly in ancient Greece, are actually claims about it. Prologue-like, the poem invokes the archetypal “hero.” An italicized second section alludes to Hector as a “warhorse drags the hero round.” A second possible interpretation might indicate Achilles still steering the horse. The image therefore appears like a superposition, not in itself distinguishing which hero it intends, victor or vanquished. The double meaning separates both heroes from their audiences, the “ill-starred / man-at-arms unsung,” by their audience’s own archetypal projection. It also shows the projection’s ability to move to another “hero.”
The third section reflects on the continuality of this process:
will the story never stop
to read our minds to mark our place
in the margins and set aside
the wayward gods clairvoyants made
a metaphor for who we are?
Notably, the poem’s most emotional appeal corresponds with the ongoing nature of these “classical” projections, their continuous effect reaching us, we who can almost feel ourselves speaking these lines. The question asks concurrently if the story will stop reading our minds, as in telling us what we think—and if it will stop so that we can “read” our own minds as they are without inherited or archetypal roles recurring through our lives. Similarly, “set aside” refers both to “our place” in society and its narratives—and the implied wish to move beyond control of the “wayward gods,” themselves “made” as both a mirror in which we may seek self-understanding and therefore also a device of the narratives used to control us. The poem, like the book it opens, employs puns and equivocal images to present mutually exclusive thoughts in their conjoined archetypal origins.
“Ilium” features a different kind of “clairvoyant” in a “dead-end alleyway”:
In the shadow dancer’s almond eyes an insect
craving the insect gods for their brief lives abided by.
And who are we to live beyond her ecstasy
if not to carry it on, if not in Heaven here,
on this our more or less common ground?
The insect represents the shadow dancer’s current partner amidst the “tallow of sex / and garbage,” reflecting her recurrent divinity in his worship. The scene of human waste itself equates them with insects, its survivors. Yet, the title puns Troy and the hip bones, reconnecting the settings of the epic war poem and this this back alley “ecstasy” on “common ground.” As with the soldiers’ need for a hero who intuitively, instinctively evokes bravery, this nihilistic valorization of momentary “Heaven” projects a numinosity onto the shadow dancer, who reaffirms the insect-nature of her other in temporarily releasing their awareness of it. We are, here again, pulled into the poem by direct emotional appeal at the end just as conceptual metaphor threatens to retreat into abstraction; rather than remaining aloof from the pathology, the poem homeopathically reconnects us with our own “insect / craving” nature.
“Overlooked By the High-Strung Moon” features a similar paradox. The title plays with inherited associations between the moon and unbalanced emotions. These psychological possibilities are dissociated from the character—or another one—with “almond eyes.” These dynamics can be read on both social and intrapsychic levels:
when
it tasted like blood to her, her sugared voice
bore witness to a side of her that likes
the taste her bite mark left him tender from.
It was in her nature, after all, pleasure
and pain being what they are to the abstract
goddess she’d changed back into overnight.
Her continual transformation into the “abstract / goddess” takes place in the literalized fantasy of her ability to grant prayers, fantasies. The goddess aspect is primal and unconscious, the abstract part the ideation necessary to make sense of the “tender” feelings of exposure and confusion after the answered prayer was no answer. The tenderness, along with the implied return from godhood, are also the places where the poem’s holding together of fantasy and reality allow our empathy to reach both characters. The phrase “almond eyes,” originally an Orientalizing projection of colonials, extends the scope of these insights to cultures’ destructively literalized fantasies of other cultures.
Both the intrapsychic and intercultural insights help us to understand the italicized voices’ return in “The Burning World.” To “a boy in love with war games” who is “carried away / on the tidal washings of a digital feed,” an italicized voice responds, “Al-Qaim, Anah, Haditha, Hīt,” sites of battles in Iraq known through the same screens as the games, appropriated like a digitally mediated mantra. The following section’s voice suggests a parallel pursuit of “dreams through / the high-rise / of a glass / syringe,” the fallacy that altering perception of reality draws us closer to it another means of literalizing fantasy. This is complicated by the voice’s use of spiritualized rhetoric: “Let mind’s eye / see what eyes / have seen.”
The third section pivots to an actual soldier, “bored” despite experiencing “creosoted Hebron skies. / Afghan peaks that burn all night / like something wired.” This character is “[l]ike an eco- / tourist,” opening to the final sections, in which the italicized voice sees through the “[t]horn forest tended like a putting green” and the general con of selling life as travel packages “we call: EXPERIENCE.” The italicized voice cuts through to the hollowed core of such faux “EXPERIENCE” itself: “Time stops. / Restarts / Applause.” The italics that earlier implied a fantasy voice, here mocks its own addiction to hollow promises. Our empathy to the disillusioned soul paradoxically opens it to those still enthralled, and vice versa, as we have seen how the states are aspects of one another.
Alterity takes on different perspectives in different shadows throughout the book, many of which appear ignored, misrepresented, or misunderstood. Reflection upon these aspects of itself is one way consciousness moves, as culture moves by reflecting upon its history—or historiography. Endlessly self-complicating, psyche can only witness itself as/if an other. Varieties of shadow and consciousness form and reform strange loops throughout The Burning World, its fragments the other sides of spaces for our own meditation. Or, from another perspective, the fragments’ openings of compelling pathos remind us of our fragmentary nature, envisioning ourselves into seemingly greater unities our great human power and peril.
The Burning World, by Sherod Santos. Arrowsmith Press, May 2023. 62 pages. $18.00, paper.
Michael Collins’ poems and book reviews have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 70 journals and magazines. He is also the author of the chapbooks How to Sing When People Cut Off Your Head and Leave It Floating in the Water and Harbor Mandala, and the full-length collections Psalmandala and Appearances, which was named one of the best indie poetry collections of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews. He teaches creative and expository writing at New York University and has taught at The Hudson Valley Writer’s Center, The Bowery Poetry Club, and several community outreach and children’s centers in Westchester. He is the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, NY.
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