Oubliette

by Peter Richards

In his introduction to this, Richards' debut collection, Tomaz Salamun writes "It is inscrutable how Peter Richards produces this religious magma and bathes himself and us in it. How he restores internal time to the work of art."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0970367228
• ISBN13: 9780970367228
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Wave Books
• Length: 72 Pages
• Weight: 0.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

The Unfurled Blue - Color and Religion in Peter Richards's Oubliette

Peter Richards's first poetry volume, Oubliette (Amherst, Mass. 2001) is a poetic dialectic boiling over with birds, colors - particularly blue, hoods, rain, hair, the sea, Greek mythology, Old Testament characters, and God. Part Imagism, part Symbolism, and always a combination of the two, Oubliette (from the French verb oublier, "to forget") takes the reader from Moses' pre-birth to romantic love in a gritty part of a 21st-century city, engaging tropes of religion and nature on each poetic journey. Its 48 poems share one theme - words and people that want to emerge, or hide in a liminal existence. The book opens with a poem titled "Remainder." The title alone is fascinating for the way its linguistic roots are opposite to "Oubliette." "Remain" derives from a literal Latin translation, "remanere," to remain or to stay, while "forget" comes from Old English, "letting go of." An oubliette, the noun is a French word for a dungeon, from which escape is possible only through an exit in the ceiling. In "Remainder," the persona may be using the oubliette (noun) as a safe space from which decide which writings will remain, and which to take with him to the outside. "But I fear there is no carriage to begin with,/ nor place to be inside of. No sooner do I arrive/ than I find this or that is already full." The last two lines indicate he fears showing his poetry, his images, to outsiders. There is cheer in what one has become used to, although Richards shows us the rarity of words: he chooses a threatened species to represent poetry, and the oubliette has become its palace. More recently I'm afraid of the linnets. I fear for the palatine comfort in their still-day song. "The Hood" shows birds as more frightening. The author is carving "a great bird of prey in the ground," but explores his work before it is completed. He is trapped there by birds, and although "I went down hooded before it was mine--"the design he made, a series of inanimate perforations, becomes threatening - "and the great bird of prey was the hood I see." Although it may be construed as a stretch to associate Richards's birds with poetry, the author makes good use of myth, and in myth, birds are associated with, among other anthropomorphic attributes, poetry. "The Hood" suggests Richards's narrator is revealing a poem that is unfinished, and that act is causing him grief. The color blue emerges in the fourth poem, "The Blue Nest," and appears frequently throughout the volume. It is such a fair color that, in this poem, the speaker steals it from the home of birds, making an Imagist's gift of it in the envoi. When they finally lay sleeping I crept down from my ambuscade And carefully wrapped their blueness in paper. It is the same paper you're holding now. "Suicide's Last Week at a Glance" is anomalous to the volume's subjects. Hardly symbolic, it looks at the calendar ("week-at-a-glance) of someone who would end his life - and did. Each day is x'd out, until th

gnosticism just got a whole lot sexier

I didn't know or care much about the gnostic scriptures until I heard Peter Richards give a reading in Boston this spring. His reading was amazing, the poems and delivery poised between ecstasy and complete devastation. What surprised me most was how sexy he made spiritual concerns seem--the way he blended the erotic and the contemplative lives. The poems in Oubliette give voice to the dirty saint in all of us and should be cherished for that reason.

True and clear, more familiar than "religious magma" . . .

The reviews on this book's page (and even some of the blurbs on its back cover) seem, unfortunately, to be of the sort that discourage people from exploring poetry. I was a student a few years back in Peter Richards' excellent poetry class at Tufts University, and his most remarkable talent as both teacher and writer was to rescue this art from pretentious language and cryptic ramblings. The value of his instruction is just as evident in his own work compiled here. Consider, for example, "The Moon is a Moon," a poem that appears to be a reaction to verse that obfuscates reality rather illuminating it: "The moon is not a hole / into an alternate sky / where the dark is quiet, / the thunder white.... / The moon is a rock with blue scrapes." Here, as elsewhere, Richards demonstrates that the most poetic insights inhere, as I can imagine him saying, in the quotidian, and are lost on those who think so little of their own experiences and sensations that they must supplement them with an artificial depth. I do not mean to suggest by this that the beauty of these poems is always obvious on the surface: Most need to be read many times for full effect. They also are best appreciated line-by-line, the better to absorb the clarity that is the hallmark of Richards' voice. Real highlights in this collection include "Circled Square Drawn to Scale," "This is the Color," "Boy for Sale," "The Sea Looking On," "Central Square," and others. I would especially recommend this book to readers of Charles Simic, Pattiann Rogers, and Wallace Stevens.

A beautifully written collection

Richards successfully blends the old and the new, the mystical and the mundane, the past and the future, and creates a world in which the reader is both invited and exiled from. It is a world that is occupied by lovers and the uninvited "third tree" (or the "three shades of love"), of playful word plays and rhythmic braides, of concealment and disclosure. Perhaps Salamun is right. Richards could be the leader of the next generation of American poets.

Dark Beauty

Oubliette is a powerful, dark and beautiful book of poems. While the title is absolutely appropriate -- a dungeon entered through a hole in the ground -- one imagines the prisoner has found a way to entertain himself in the darkness. The poems celebrate the power of the imagination over that of dissolution and decay. They are subtly playful -- and one of the real highlights is the poem that remembers a lover's ease at falling asleep under a tree in daylight -- a heartbreaking memory to recall in an oubliette. The poem that obsessively returns to the word "doth" is also brilliantly funny, repeating "doth" until it's meaningless, and ending "hey Doth, Doth, are you there, Doth?" One imagines the question echoing in the dark chamber.