A Very Little Book of Verse

By Margot Lettner

I have held some very little books in my hand: A Book of Glad Tidings, that populist assemblage of quotidian proofs, sayings, keepsake wisdom, The Book of Common Prayer, how it sayst, giveth, and doth in a daunting montage of unfamiliar yet sounding language, Haiku, pearls in the weave, an Italian-English phrasebook fitted to a jean pocket, such a slim raconteur.

Gregory Betts’s The Others Raisd in Me is another very little book. I want to carry it tucked upright in my hand, hold it to the breast pocket of my good cloth coat, my forefinger slipped between its pages where “i am / is / negated by / this / negative ability” and when “at the end of things / strength of skin / exceeds // love of metal” (218, 219). While in his anteroom to the book Betts says “the Others that rise are the self and its metal shadow.” This is the skin of the book, its gorgeous linen finish, that’s the first sensation.

The Others Raisd in Me is a dipping book. You open it here, or here, or there, and in each place you find something small “from a smile in / that brightness of winter / i hear a snow in me” (34), or “what power this / cinnamon sky // rust / sun-rinsed/in red” (115), or “o / to / oo / too” (187). Then you find something slightly larger, you think, as in “i swear / that in my mind / voices / lie” (49); slightly more profound, you believe, would be “shortest / between three / is sex” (191).

Then you read

as i fight

with insufficiency

 

my art sways

to give the lie

 

to grace

and reason (35)

and, as Teresa of Avila says of her visions, one of the many Others Betts collects on his prophetic way through the West’s intellectual landscape, “the pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans” (n.p.).

Of course, the wisdom of slightly larger things is that they are, really, small things after all. There’s a kind of elasticity and vibrancy to the molecule; you just know that it’s packing a lot. Poetry knows this. Shakespeare knows this. His sonnets know this, and they’re quite pleased with their ripples. The Others Raisd in Me is a plunder book. Its borrowings spill over its margins and pages and are filling my pocket softly, madly, with notions: “in my mind / how to make and see // the others / raisd in me” (19, my emphasis).

There’s something about these very little books, left, as they often are, so casually on the checkout counter. Something for the plane. Goes well with a muffin. Slips into an overnight bag. Beware the very little book: it is making me say a thing so perilous I should only whisper and pretend I lie, if only to stay the tooth and claw of our collective ironic self. Beware the very little book because “nothing / is more/beautiful” (64).

.