Civil Service

Civil Service / Claire Schwartz / Graywolf Press, August 2022 - $16 (Paperback)

Claire Schwartz’s Civil Service—courtesy of Graywolf Press this past August—opens with a request: “please, come in.” Soon after, the tall, gaunt outline of a milk carton hovers above Schwartz’s words, having grown in size from page to page from the book’s beginning. “Inside the milk carton: I,” she writes. “The town square, the threshold, the book. / The house, the host, the cell, the hormones, the history.” And she wonders aloud: “Is this a house or a cell?”

Civil Service is clearly (and self-consciously) the culmination of many years of what Fred Moten refers to as study (a “devotional, sacramental, anamonastic kind of intellectual practice”): Schwartz writes first and foremost as a reader, and the book wonders seriously and thoughtfully about state power, 21st century capitalism, race, sex, love, and even—maybe especially—metapoetics.

In reaching for Civil Service’s central conceit, it might be easy to think of the book as essentially parabolic. Many of the collection’s poems catalog the foibles of an almost comical procession of many of state power’s myrmidons: the Archivist’s sight is obscured by books; the Board Chair, repeating I hear you, silences a female colleague; the Intern, ignoring her family’s requests for money, tucks a penny under her tongue. Yet, after a faux-exegesis of her poem “Parable,” Schwartz offers a reminder of sorts: “Oh, the many ways to misread,” she writes. “Or that other risk, the greater one, and what you’d have to do with it—.”

Parables are, of course, didactic in nature. And Schwartz, capable of cutting deeply from the most vertiginous heights of abstraction, gives the feeling that, by the end of the book, hardly a stone has been left unturned. Yet, though Schwartz offers no shortage of steely epigrams and pithy turns of phrase on everything from confessional poetry to ownership, nothing about the book is closed or contained. “Poetry is a door without a house,” she writes. Later, she adds:

“A person can be with a word like they can be with a body:

            Wash it.

            Accompany it.

            Be changed by its nearness.”

Civil Service is, if nothing else (although a lot more), a lot of words. May we treat it as such.

--Chase Bush-McLaughlin