‘If You Can Tell’ an Aching Meditation on Religion

“If You Can Tell” is the highly anticipated seventh collection of poetry by James McMichael, writer of the 2006 National Book Award in Poetry finalist “Capacity.” Like“Capacity,” “If You Can Tell” has short lines characteristic of the poet’s recent work, unlike his earlier long-lined, explicitly autobiographical poems. In this latest collection, he effectively completes his shift from an emotive, personal tone to a dispassionate and ponderous one with densely packed lines sometimes as short as a single syllable. Composed of eight long, flooring poems, “If You Can Tell” beautifully traces the life of a boy as he meditates on questions of what is unseen and what is assumed, particularly God and the tautological nature of religion.

McMichael creates a successful transformation in his speaker as the boy searches for God and the unseen, a metamorphosis made most apparent in the contrast between the opening and closing poems. The former begins the conversation with the fittingly titled “The Believed In.” “Christmas comes from stories,” McMichael opens. He then springboards from this one-liner to an investigation of God, older generations, and love. The very same stories that construct Christmas, a stand-alone holiday, also harbor a “promise that God’s love for us will outstrip death.” But even having acknowledged a believed-in God, the speaker would “rather it be // love that at its last the body can’t // take anymore and dies of.” These lines introduce a thoughtful binary that will continue throughout the poems: Individual resilience and a reliance on humanity versus God himself, in all the glory and mystery that surrounds him.

By the final poem, the speaker is jaded and frankly yet masterfully addresses the problems he sees in a faulty God. God’s love and faith is unconditional, the speaker asserts, “on one condition. / ‘If you are not My people, / I am not your God.’” This unsettlingly conditional love and power given to those who believe echoes in the rest of the poem as the speaker makes his final, profound move toward meditations on death and how it applies to himself. “God’s said to let the truthful / keep their lives forever if they swear God / does what He says,” McMichael writes. In this passage, the speaker capably explores the unsatisfying if-then aspect of religious belief and decides that if all of it is true, life is rendered obsolete, as it has no lasting effects on individuals. After addressing the vital problems of religion, the subject the poem naturally resolves on is death. The turn is so fitting—it is as though the speaker simply stumbles upon the revelation that Death, silent, hovers in the background: “Under its breath it primes me to pay up and look pleasant.” From beginning to end, the speaker is a vessel through which McMichael ponders the greater questions of faith and religion and the space between the two.

The language of the book itself is inventive and subversive to the point of forcing a careful reading. McMichael’s measured and plain language is a wonderfully sharp contrast to the speaker’s muddled, late-life process of sorting memory and wonderings into a cohesive whole. He has, in this collection, mastered the art of the short line. Varied stanza length and line syllable allowance refresh his compact, coiled, highly allusive language to create poems that never settle into a tiring tone. Word plays, inverted sentence structure, and pronoun games accumulate before giving way to a rumination on life’s stages. The poems, told in an unspecified past tense, reflect on a life both full and oddly incomplete, containing hollow parts filled with longing for wonder that turns into an attempt at religion. The speaker is caught up in insecurity over a lack of strong belief in God: “I wanted to be asleep so I wouldn’t go on making // God up out of the wind.”

The larger image of God in the poems is a looking glass through which the speaker explores issues of faith within a Christian context. “I’m not awake to God as the father of Jesus. / (God remains // God to me / and not a person),” the speaker says, revealing the inaccessible nature of religion. However, the poems are neither strictly devout nor strictly doubting, purposefully reflecting the human predicament of faith and forever suspended in a place between “Nowhere-yet” and “Nowhere-any-longer.” Yet the meditations are certainly not unfruitful. The speaker’s quest to belief inheres comprehensive questions on the nature of time, trust, intimacy, and attachment, and his preoccupation with death makes the need for the questions more intense, even as it makes the answers more difficult—even impossible—to find. “If You Can Tell” combines mastery of both the creation and the formatic manipulation of language to create an exquisite search for meaning common to every human soul.

—Staff writer Victoria E. Sanchez can be reached at victoria.sanchez@thecrimson.com.