Port Ebony

Roger Nash is a philosophy professor and author of Night Flying.

Jalowica’s latest collection gives us a heightened sense of the
intense absorption in words required of a poet. “There is nothing
outside the text”: that could serve as a motto for this book.
Derrida’s proposition is imbued with paradox, insightful in some
senses but reductive and simply false in others. Jalowica’s poems
divide, for parallel reasons, into strong poetic meditations and others
that hemorrhage sense in a reduction of life to text.

At his best, and in a handful of poems, he eschews abstraction and
captures a sense of vivid (and perhaps tragic) life. In “Fighter
Pilot,” the discipline of attending to the particular results in
sharply focused and interlocking images of alienated combat. Sharp
objective correlates are formed for inner states, as “Vipers waken /
from a laudanum dream” at the passionless end of a relationship
(“Geography”).

However, in many of Jalowica’s poems, general terms, straying at
times into jargon, erode sense: “domestic matrices,” “rote
forms,” “causality” (“Fortress”); “radically inseparable,”
“eternally coeval,” “subtext” (“Ivory Pause”). Images follow
one another unconnectedly, as though in lists, losing a sense of
speaker, experience, and place (“Fortress”). Poems talk about
experiences rather than create them in concrete imagery.

Finally, in the misleading sense of Derrida’s proposition, life may
seem reduced to the text of a poem. Couples in town are replaced by the
courtship of words (“Cross-Town Pickup”). A love song leaves us with
no sense of the lover, the beloved, or even the nature of their love
(“Love Song”). It is revealing that Jalowica, in a biographical note
at the end of the book, speaks of editing his own existence.