Georgia Press
Fall 1999
64 pages
ISBN:
0820321699
If you are looking for a book of poems ruthless and luxuriant enough to see you into the third millennium, take along Rachel Loden’s Hotel Imperium, winner of the 1999 University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poets Prize. These startling and vibrant poems capture the tristesse of the post-apocalyptic era, the whimpering end of the Cold War, and the "irrational exuberance" that comes "after the end." Loden’s poems are especially necessary and important now, because they will temper the noisy hype of millennial newness and its promise of release from history. "You will enter history," announces the book’s first section, which mourns the last fifty years of a brutal century, while refusing to be consoled by apocalyptic fantasies of rebirth or regeneration:
...I don’t want to see the zeroes turn
as on a clock about to wake us
from a murderous dream, confetti falling
helplessly into the fissured past.
I don’t want them to unload the gurney
from the festooned ambulance:
the revelers in all their unforgiving
fury, the new patient in her bandages.
Inspired by an odd array of Cold War artifacts, Loden casts a cold eye on Elvis Presley’s death certificate, Richard Nixon’s last will and testament, the White House bowling alley built by Nixon’s friend Bebe Rebozo, and Clairol and lingerie ads from the 1960s. The book’s sustained theme is the disintegration of the Cold War dialectic into the "new world order mysteries." In one poem, Loden offers us "Blues for the Evil Empire." In another, she rewrites Gerard Manley Hopkins’ elegiac lyric, in which Margaret grieves for "goldengrove unleaving," so that a young Svetlana (Stalin’s daughter) mourns, equally unknowingly, for this century’s catastrophic events.
In the extraterritorial Hotel-world of global capital, we are all on the move, whether as tourists, refugees, or vagabonds. Loden’s "Hotel Imperium" is peopled with strange and ghostly lodgers, most notably the former leaders of the Western world and the Soviet Bloc. Represented by Loden in their mental and physical decline, these "cold warriors, like dying jellyfish," are beginning to "grow dim." Richard Nixon slips "in and out of consciousness," while his dog Checkers, about to be exhumed, speaks reassuring words from beyond the grave. Ronald Reagan’s overcoat, enlivened after museum enshrinement proceedings, gives a last, and amiable, salute. We contemplate "Lenin’s body [on display in a Red Square mausoleum], chilly like a mammoth / in an ice floe." Loden is at her best when she combines her grimly acute historical observations with the "errant / sweetness" and breadth of learning characteristic of her book’s guiding presence, Robert Duncan. Then we re-experience, with a shock, our century’s unholy mixture of paradise and wasteland.
The human body—erotic, ecstatic, torn, and tortured—is a constant presence in Hotel Imperium. The book’s presiding spirit is the violated figure of "revenge," who "lies sweetly in the fields / with her legs open, / her Bo Peep / petticoats in ribbons." To this bloody figure and its promise of future violence, Loden proposes a counter-figure, "love." If love cannot offer us redemption ("saving nothing standing in its wake"), it can offer us new histories out of which new futures may be possible. We are lucky to have in Rachel Loden a troubadour unafraid to sing of terror, and a brilliant balladeer of our history’s shabbiest episodes. As we move into a new millennium, we should listen carefully to this self-professed "rhapsodist of cunning" and "songbird of iniquity" as she sings sweetly of "love, revenge, remaindering."
—Kathleen Crown in American Letters & Commentary
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