On Suzanne Buffam's collection, The Irrationalist (Canarium)

by Nora Delaney, from the new issue of The Critical Flame:

Buffam’s works in The Irrationalist are less poems than aphorisms and short proddings at ideas of faith and knowledge, perspective and relativity. Their language is unbeautiful, the verse free of obvious technical flourishes. They recall Neitzsche more than Rilke. Always, the weightiest sentiments and phrases are borrowed. Just as we contend with William James in “Placebo,” we come upon Plato and Aristotle in later poems. The philosophers are also joined by scientists: Galileo and Copernicus hold court in section two. And her chosen cadre of artists — Buñuel, Éluard, Picasso, Borges — appear throughout.

This chorus of voices, however, is used to particular effect, revealing with each maxim and axiom how limited human knowledge is. Buffam delights in playing an anti-Enlightenment game: we are truly doomed if we think we can reason through things. The irrational trumps the rational. This motif is most assured in a number of short prose poems that fill out the last third of the book. In her long prose poem “Trying,” for example, Buffam meditates on the strangeness — the irrationality — of a couple trying to conceive a child. Her speaker wonders,

If procreation were a matter to be decided purely on the basis of
rational thought, would the human race still exist? Schopenhauer thought not.

Read the rest of this review by Nora Delaney at The Critical Flame.