Already in his first book, The Gun My Sister Killed Herself With,  Danny Lawless operates with an acute self-consciousness. In that collection, one poem’s title confesses: “The Memory of My Memory is My Memory.” That the poet’s memories are layered–even varnished–doesn’t require a confession, of course. All of us coat the past with something to bring out its grain. Most of us, however, apply that finish (something protective and often toxic) without paying too much attention to the operation. Lawless, no. In fact, in his new collection, I Tell You This Now, he underscores again and again how, like the memory that is the memory of a memory, what he can tell us is really only the telling of a telling.

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Throughout I Tell You This Now, then, the poet remains keenly aware of the fact that everything that he is telling us has to cross a small but important gulf. This writer foregrounds the fact that language is not stable; rather, it has a tendency to give, where give means to stretch—and maybe also to yield to some overwhelming force: grief or forgetting or the very limits of what words can contain. At the same time, the poems’ give is their crossing, thanks to an act of generosity, from the possession of one person to the possession of another. Lawless’s poems give in that sense, too.

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Indeed, the pliability and insufficiency of language rises to the level of a theme in I Tell You This Now. In this collection, Lawless points both to words’ weak spots and to the bounty of meaning they can convey. Some of his poems function to define their titles, deftly moving back and forth between whimsy and precision. For example, Lawless plays up the shifty potential of  the words “Dither” and “Ullage” and “Aglet” (each of which are titles), proposing playful Balderdash-appropriate meanings for each before settling into the real richness of their connotations. Elsewhere, in having demoted “Once,” calling it “perhaps less a word / than an exhalation,” Lawless turns and praises its abundance: “sometimes a little wince / in there, a little ache. Desire, too. And wonder.”

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In another poem, he recalls a scene from his step-mother’s deathbed and notes:

 

The hopeful more we heard in morte each time

Her French flatmate spoke.

The way-worn Go in that woeful Gone.

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This poem demonstrates the pliability of language by noting the way the French word for death is, before it resolves in a hard “t” sound, the homophone for an English word that connotes plenty. Likewise, it hears the pedestrian verb “go” before the step-mother’s flatmate finishes uttering the whole past participle, before she breaches the “n” that signals closure, an irreversible departure.

 

Single words, though, are only the beginning. Lawless finds language perhaps even more dubious and expansive when it comes to summative claims: claims about what happened, claims that deliver stories and speculate on the morals of those stories.

Maybe you can hear the indeterminacy even in the sentence that names the book, although I suspect that only after reading the poems inside does the title’s declaration—I Tell You This Now—reveal the many ways its meaning might shift under our feet. These poems, after all, with their griefs and nostalgias, heighten our awareness of how wily a “now” is. The first poem in the book, set during a solar eclipse in 1965, ends by addressing the speaker’s brother:

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[...] And—so long ago now

how did you put it?—the delicious, insistent thought

What if it stays like this? To yearn and yet not to know yet

What that yearning meant.

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In part, this poem forefronts how brief any “now” is, how many “yets” are packed between the stuff of the past and our summoning it up in memory. But in such a slippery “now” there is also something ample: room for more than immediacy. Maybe even room for transcendence, or, anyway, the yearning for it.

 

I Tell You This Now, then, reminds us that we cannot grasp the moments we would call “now” (for better and for worse). At the same time, it also insists that the “this” we want to tell cannot be held in our hands. The word “this,” in fact, is mostly gesture; it amounts to an arrow shot over one’s shoulder at an antecedent, or, at times, to a vector that points forward, wagering on an assurance’s popping up.

 

In this volume’s title poem, for instance, “this” keeps slipping and blooming. Lawless writes:

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I tell you this now, Tom, because you are dead. Because speaking

To the flawed dead who are perfect now is easy,

As I lean again tonight

Over your body, and stare a long time into your eyes

As through a train window veiled with soft dust, until the words

I read then but never got a chance to say come to me

As a few simple wishes: that despite the anguish and crazy hungers

That spiraled through your life, you too might have known

The calm I knew that afternoon of iron

Mailbox handles and dark tire tracks in snow, and somehow

Understood the salvation

Of Guinea hens hidden from the hired girl’s hatchet

In impossible places, asleep in the trees, even if that salvation was

Not yours; [...]

[A] wish that says, after the terrible whirlwind

Blew through it was as if on a train the conductor

Had poked you and you arrived out of darkness

Suddenly awake to a strange new city, utterly happy.

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How full is the word “this”: it contains simple wishes for calm, for joy, for the possibility of salvation; but it also lassoes every far-from-simple thing that, in this poem, swarms those wishes, from whirlwinds to hatchets; and then, too, it names an empathy that cannot settle on where Tom and the writer begin or land, inside the train or on its platform, departing or arriving, seeing the other off or welcoming him. (So even “I” and “you” feel changeable, as indeed those pronouns are.) All of which is to say that everywhere in Lawless’s language, we find both kinds of give: instability and openhandedness.

 

And while “I Tell You This Now”’s telling comes across as fluent and sure, untouched by misgiving, on several occasions the poet emphasizes the collapsible structures of his telling, as well. “Why Write?” begins “What if I told you once there was a father who chiseled / six live kittens out of his little son’s cat’s belly”? and pauses midway to ask, “Would you wonder if it was true, if I was that boy[?]”.  The poem continues, telling its whole story by way of questions, hypothetical and conditional. Of course, every “what if” and “would” allows that the speaker’s account might not be altogether airtight. In essence, Lawless concedes here again: “the memory of my memory is my memory.” He concedes that the story told in “Why Write?” is neither unassailable nor flimsy, neither quite firsthand knowledge nor exactly hearsay. 

 

In that imperfection, there is also charity, most overtly in the form of a loophole that a father might squeeze through. But it is also true that if this memory is provisional—a stop-gap rather than a conclusion—it is simultaneously a provision: something we carry to sustain us or our traveling companions, something that fulfills a need. In this case, the poem is a provision because it turns a harrowing experience into proof of resilience, as well as into art. It turns into a little morsel of survival and of trust, even as it asks whether the reader would believe the speaker when he says “that if I could carve a poem out of this / I could do anything?”

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I would believe him, perhaps because these last lines confess as much as they boast. Someone who can do anything, after all, is capable not only of “carv[ing] a poem” out of an awful moment; he is capable of doing awful things himself, the same as the father who “chisel[s]” kittens from a “cat’s belly.” And I believe it because “Why Write?” comes only a few pages after a poem that takes ten lines, full of honesties both brutal and tender, to get from “Can I tell you, Father, at last” to the actual telling, to “—can I tell you at last, Father, that I loved you?”.

Finally, then, the beauty of I Tell You This Now is that, yes, the “nows” keep slipping through our fingers, and, no, what we want to tell those we love won’t stay put such that, in the end, we can only gesture toward what we mean, but—even so—we can tell our dear and difficult ones that we loved them. We can “spea[k] / To the flawed dead who are perfect now” and, maybe, they to us. Daniel Lawless tells us this now: we can. We can err our way into mercy because words stretch and bend and fail to shoulder the fullness of what we mean even as they hold out to us the abundance of memory and the abundance of forgiveness.