Beauty in the Shadows, Shadows in Beauty: A Review of Sue Sinclair’s Heaven’s Thieves.
Sue Sinclair’s most recent collection, Heaven’s Thieves, picks up on themes explored in her earlier work, extending a now career-long philosophical meditation on various incarnations of beauty. In Heaven’s Thieves, Sinclair examines this concept in a multitude of forms, revealing a now well-established predilection for ekphrasis and lyrics on the natural world, as well as poetic responses to music and philosophy. What distinguishes this book in the greater context of her oeuvre, however, is its commitment to exploring the darker aspects of beauty, expressed through a study of rot, death, and violence. Sinclair turns her attention to beauty in places of moral decay, inviting us to consider the ethical implications of both the all-consuming desire that beauty inspires and the beauty that is present in destruction.
Much like Jan Zwicky, another poet with an academic background in philosophy, Sinclair is committed to engaging with philosophical discussions in verse and bringing a sustained attention to our world. In this most recent title, she concerns herself with grand, overarching subjects: art, goodness, evil. While the quotidian occasionally figures in this metaphysical meditation on creation, myth, beauty, and meaning, it is not as present as in her earlier work. The entire first section of her first book, Secrets of Weather & Hope (Brick Books, 2001), for example, is dedicated to “Household Effects”, in which everyday objects provide opportunities for metaphysical reflection. In the poem “Red Pepper,” the vegetable is likened to a human heart, itself a symbol for emotional capacity. The poem’s organization reveals a pattern that recurs throughout Secrets of Weather & Hope and Sinclair’s later collections:
Put your hand on it. The size of your heart. Which may look like this, abashed perhaps, growing in ways you never predicted. It is almost painful to touch, but you can’t help yourself. It’s so familiar. The dents. The twisted symmetry. You can see how hard it has tried.
Playing with the typical functioning of metaphor, Sinclair moves from tenor (pepper) to vehicle (heart), and then implicitly re-works the metaphor in the opposite direction. The reader comes to see that the red pepper illuminates as much about the heart as the heart does the pepper, and, in fact, the focus comes to rest on the vehicle of comparison.
Similarly, in “Parrot Tulips”, a poem from Sinclair’s third collection, The Drunken Lovely Bird (Goose Lane Editions, 2004), a study on flowers gives way to an extended metaphor for childhood:
Twisting and curling, petals opening like beaks, like unruly children who will say anything once and get away with it. Trapped in the slow ways of growth they are maddened and desperate for something new.
In these earlier collections, everyday objects lend themselves to philosophical or moral reflections, inspiring awe for the world around us and showcasing Sinclair’s strengths in figurative language.
There are few such poems in her latest collection, where the quotidian is not as prominent and the tone is more-overtly pessimistic, though Sinclair continues to favour metaphor and comparison. The first poem in Heaven’s Thieves, “Winter in the Garden,” takes as its setting no less than the newly post-lapsarian Garden of Eden: “Everything sleeps. / The serpent curls around the roots of the apple tree, / which is bare.” The setting allows the speaker to evoke future catastrophes from our contemporary world, greater still than the fate of Adam and Eve:
Meanwhile they dream, sometimes of the legendary chunk of apple carried down to Earth in Eve’s stomach, though the real meaning of fallen eludes them: in jobless towns along the US-Mexico border 80% of the young men want to be hired assassins. What can Eden find to compare to this?
Heaven’s Thieves unfolds from this perspective of a fallen world. It comprises six sections, alluding to the six days of creation in the Hebrew Bible. The title is shared by the second poem, an ekphrastic piece on the natures mortes of Dutch Renaissance painter Pieter Claesz. Here the speaker invites the reader to contemplate the aesthetic pleasure derived from an image of epicurean consumption:
The light is Promethean: let it pour over you, let it shine in the eyes of whoever looks your way, let even the damage gleam and be satisfied, which is what the fish and wine and fruit are doing, look: simmering in the stubborn sun, paraded on the table like subdued peacocks, plates dressed in the spoils of a ransacked heaven.
In her use of the imperative, the poet implicates the reader, bringing her attention to a shining, striking image of death and consumption.
Heaven’s Thieves unfolds from this perspective of a fallen world.
The voracious appetites suggested in this poem reappear a few pages later, in the prose piece “Loving Pavlova”, which establishes an implicit comparison between the Russian prima ballerina Anna Pavlova and a photograph of Earth taken by Voyager 1. Both the photograph and Pavlova, the poem reveals, were subjected to the hungry passions of their audiences:
Voyager 1, four billion miles from Earth, sent back a photograph. It used to hang in a NASA auditorium, seemed unremarkable, a few streaks of light on a black background, but about halfway down, toward the right, you could find the tiniest revelatory blue speck. And almost every visitor who saw that barely-there dot touched it: the image got worn, like the steps of public buildings. It kept having to be replaced. Why not give in to beauty, consider its truth? Anna Pavlova danced the swan in a perfect white tutu. She had a dessert of meringue and cream named after her. She also had bad teeth—really terrible. Ruinous. There’s almost no footage of her Dying Swan, but there are photographs, and in some she’s smiling, mouth open. Her audiences didn’t care. They wanted to sit in darkened auditoriums and watch, feel the hush of the swan sinking to the floor then applaud it back to life.
In a deft move, Sinclair takes two emblems of beauty—a classical dancer and the Earth—and draws attention to how they illustrate beauty’s dark “truth”: that it is destined to be consumed. In the wonder and awe it inspires, beauty leads to its own tragic destruction, which seems to do little to discourage our attentions. The implications of such destruction are not limited to the scope of the poem, either; Pavlova is an emblem of objectified femininity, adored and consumed even with rotting teeth, while the smudged photograph could represent contemporary environmental degradation or a thwarted desire for human connection. Regardless of the motivation behind the act, the human impulse to touch the natural beauty that surrounds us leads to destruction—a result that Sinclair returns to later in the collection.
Sinclair illustrates beauty’s dark “truth”: that it is destined to be consumed. In the wonder and awe it inspires, beauty leads to its own tragic destruction.
The poet also considers the tragic implications of beauty for those it mesmerizes. The epigraph of “Ends of the Earth” provides the definition of a millihelen, “the amount of beauty sufficient to launch exactly one ship.” This line alludes to Helen of Troy, a woman whose beauty elicited the desire to possess her and her city. In another poem “1st Corps de Ballet,” Sinclair describes Louis XIV’s political exploitation of aesthetics:
There was a man mistook himself for the sun, for fire. He trained assiduously. He danced because that’s what fire does, especially in the pit of the eye. To command the eye is to command the man; he was no fool.
Sinclair shirks the traditional image of the 17th-century monarch as a presentation-obsessed megalomaniac, representing him instead as an absurd, overgrown child: “Ruler since the age of four, he entertained / no comparison of the arch of his foot / but to the firmament.” Louis XIV’s deluded self-perception seems to result from the same penchant for grandiose appearances that allowed him to fashion himself as the very centre of the nation, its Sun King.
In other poems, Sinclair represents beauty in natural settings, though nature is ultimately another object of consumption, as in “Leap”:
Spring again, magnolias again, and because there is no end of praise, amateur photographers crowd the park, the same shots blooming on Instagram every year
The effects of human consumption of the natural world are exposed again in the poem “Eclogue”, which turns the classical form on its head by bringing the reader’s attention to a portrait not of simple, idyllic country life, but of a contemporary town in ruin: “The town sinks / into oblivion, heavy as organ / music.”
Elsewhere, ruin and destruction lie beneath beautiful objects. In “Mezquita-Cathedral,” a poem on the “[r]eckless hybrid” that is the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, a dazzling surface conceals a history of religious violence. The speaker addresses the building (originally a mosque commissioned by Abd al-Rhaman I and now a Catholic cathedral), describing it in a short ekphrastic movement. Then the poem turns to philosophical considerations, which are explored from the perspective of a “King Charles,” presumably King Charles V, the 16th-century Holy Roman Emperor:
Yet even King Charles felt his triumph poor: if divine truth can be split like this, pitted against itself in such a crusade, if a drop of the lifeblood can indeed transform a piece of dead rock into a living heart and if so beautiful a heart can lie in the still-beautiful body of its slain adversary, what then?
The beautiful architectural hybrid that is the Mosque-Cathedral hides a violent history, which itself cannot totally diminish the beauty of the original. Notably, the reader must trust Sinclair that the object in question is beautiful; as in the poems on Pavlova and Louis XIV, she evades any extended description of the physical. When she wants to discuss beauty, she often prefers to name it in simple terms (the words “beauty,” “beauties,” and “beautiful” appear approximately 30 times in the collection), or with images described over a few brief lines, before progressing with description that rises above the physical. In “Mezquita-Cathedral”, a two-page poem, we learn only that the columns are of “granite, marble, / jasper, onyx”, and that
the floor [is] forced to gather itself and rise into a Renaissance peak, a golden, giddying shell-like spurl that swells skyward
These images are some of the most delightful parts of Sinclair’s poetry, more immediately-pleasing than the prosaic, philosophical passages. In poems on beauty, it is somewhat surprising not to see more such images, yet her combination of vivid description and metaphysical contemplation make her point. This philosophy-poetry hybrid is, by now, something of a trademark for her writing. In this poem, we come to understand that despite its fraught history, physical beauty certainly remains in the Mosque-Cathedral. Still, “what then?” as the speaker of “Mezquita-Cathedral” asks. Sinclair invites us to reflect on the ethical implications of beauty and whether the persistence of beauty in a violent world is enough for us to find meaning.
Elsewhere in the collection, a list poem on René Descartes’s Meditations represents an ambitious intellectual pursuit, which, much like the masterpiece that is Córdoba’s Mosque-Cathedral, could be perceived as essentially meaningless given the greater context of centuries of religious strife. In both these instances, human achievements—in architecture and in philosophy—are undermined by the complications of their greater contexts. In “On the Meditations,” passages from the first meditation, De iis quae in dubium revocari possunt (“On Those Things that Can Be Called into Doubt”), the synopsis and the author’s letter to his correspondent are intercut with biographical details from Descartes’ life. The poem explores his relationship with his illegitimate daughter, Francine, who died as a child, neglected by her father:
14. Imagine a man lifting his daughter’s coffin, taking the weight of it onto fleshless, bloodless shoulders. 15. Happily disturbed by no passions. 16. For I am assured that . . . there will arise neither peril nor error from this course . . . 17. Francine, of course, had been both error and peril. 18. Facing death, he later wrote, was much easier and more sure than believing in preservation of life. 19. Imagine a man whose body, even in grief, bears the full load of his mind. 20. Imagine an error from which he never quite recovers.
This piece is one of few in the collection wherein Sinclair’s reflection veers toward the didactic, over-explaining the ironic tragedy of the philosopher’s situation in the last two lines. The implicit questions it raises are nonetheless interesting; while not treating beauty directly, it suggests a certain absurdity in human existence, even in those figures who dedicate their lives to a search for meaning.
Despite having drawn the reader’s attention to the destructive aspects of beauty and the aesthetic pleasure derived amidst violence and decay, Sinclair could have ended the collection on a hopeful note, returning to the sense of wonder and awe that prevails in her earlier collections. Instead, the last few poems in Heaven’s Thieves remain ambivalent in their examination of beauty’s persistence in our world, as in “The Dead”:
The dead don’t stop with their hearts in their throats; to die is not to wash through the body of a deer like a ghost; it isn’t to skulk under a living skin. It’s a change in the value of things. There’s no such thing as ‘the dead’: when the dead die, they don’t hold anything back. Otherwise, a bitterness, like the sediment in wine. It’s pure alchemy: the world pours itself into the vessel of the new day, and the liquid runs clear. And that’s what hurts. The clarity. It leaves you staring out the window, wondering what to forgive: the lawn more beautiful than it should be, the blades of glass all bent one way, silvered and utterly coherent, like a mirror with no face in it.
As in her earlier work, in this collection Sinclair’s strength lies in her use of figurative language and in her ability to render extended, dense philosophical reflections in verse. She treats metaphysical subjects both indirectly—through studies of art, nature, and history—and directly, in poems that are often prosaic, and which approximate philosophical meditations. Several of the poems in the book respond, for example, to assertions about “beauty” from philosophers and poets such as Bacon, Adorno, Kant, and Ovid. In “Reply to Rilke,” the speaker challenges the notion that beauty persists only in light and life: “Do we, then, have nothing to admire / as we gestate in the darkness? Are we afforded no beauty?”
Sinclair’s strength lies in her use of figurative language and in her ability to render extended, dense philosophical reflections in verse.
Where Heaven’s Thieves differs from Sinclair’s previous collections is in this tone and questioning perspective; while the poet’s representation of beauty has always been complicated, and while she has considered the more nefarious aspects of beauty in her previous collections—particularly Mortal Arguments (Brick Books, 2003) and Breaker (Brick Books, 2008)—never has this consideration been so sustained, and never has the perspective been quite so pessimistic. In Breaker, for example, the beauty found in rot is less of a challenge to a belief that beauty and goodness are associated than a source of wonder, as in “In Spring, When the Earth”:
Stepping onto the gravel-strewn porch, lifting your shoulders back in their sockets, you wonder what it is you see in this muck, ants crawling over the doorsill and an infestation of leaves mouldering on the lawn. Yet even now your eyes reveal their lustre.
Similarly, though the speaker comments sardonically on the human desire to consume beauty while shirking death in “Pelican, Point Lobos,” beauty and death are not themselves conflated in this poem, where an unidentified “you” considers a dead pelican:
You half expect it to stir now that you’re here, but the body is already withdrawing from its old habits, wet feathers plastered to the throat. It shames you, who want to own the creaturely beauty but not the death, not the body oozed like oil onto the beach. Desire, not for the first time, seems like a snake biting its own tail – bent on itself.
In Sinclair’s most recent collection, however, the link between beauty and death is often more straightforward—beauty persists both despite and in death—and the consideration of a snake-like destructive desire is given more room. In Heaven’s Thieves, beauty is clearly not to be associated exclusively with goodness; it inevitably inspires consumption. Whether that consumption is totalitarian, imperialistic, misogynistic, or ecological, it is categorically destructive. Sinclair questions the power of beauty without providing any clear answers. Where beauty persists in ruin, we are led to wonder whether that beauty is enough for there still to be meaning in our world, a question that seems especially relevant in our current context of environmental degradation and global strife.
