Peter Balakian is a renowned poet, scholar, and memoirist; but his
work as an essayist often prefigures and illuminates all three. "I
think of vise and shadow as two dimensions of the lyric (literary
and visual) imagination," he writes in the preface to this
collection, which brings together essayistic writings produced over
the course of twenty-five years. Vise, "as in grabbing and holding
with pressure," but also in the sense of the vise-grip of the
imagination, which can yield both clarity and knowledge. Consider
the vise-grip of some of the poems of our best lyric poets, how
language might be put under pressure "as carbon might be put under
pressure to create a diamond." And shadow, the second half of the
title: both as noun, "the shaded or darker portion of the picture
or view or perspective," "partial illumination and partial
darkness"; and as verb, to shadow, "to trail secretly as an
inseparable companion" or a "force that follows something with
fidelity; to cast a dark light on something-a person, an event, an
object, a form in nature." Vise and Shadow draws into conversation
such disparate figures as W B Yeats, Hart Crane, Joan Didion, Primo
Levi, Robert Rauschenberg, Bob Dylan, Elia Kazan, and Arshile
Gorky, revealing how the lyric imagination of these artists grips
experience, shadows history, and casts its own type of light,
creating one of the deepest kinds of human knowledge and sober
truth. In these elegantly written essays, Balakian offers a fresh
way to think about how the power of poetry, art, and the lyrical
imagination illuminate history, trauma, and memory.
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