Rarely does a first book resolve itself so assuredly to such a singly consistent and instructive rhetoric as The Captain Lands in Paradise, in which the continuous return to either/or constructions (“it’s either an orange or cancer”; “either a thing will happen or it won’t”; “either great dignity or the lack of it”) reveals a sensibility committed simultaneously to streamlining logical naiveté and embracing indeterminacy and possibility. Our expectations of the lyrical particular are modified everywhere and undercut by a sly, abstracting instinct. The poet nods to this tendency in “It’s a Fine Thing to Walk through the Allegory,” where she writes that “sometimes the real meaning moves from the specific / to the general,” the phrase reverberating like a koan, its wisdom in evidence throughout the collection, often assaying a tragicomic belatedness. Manguso sacrifices “the low prairie of beginnings and endings” for an altogether different geography and geometry, part rigid mise-en-scène (think Velázquez’s Las Meninas), part heart-struck melodrama; she is drawn at once to mediation, point-blank declaration, and reflected sightlines: “Innocent as eggs, the sheep look at me looking at them. / Each one blinks as if trying to remember my face.” “All love’s sighs,” she declares, “are this, simply: an inhalation, an exhalation, something between that is imagined,” and it is that “beautiful fiction,” those “names you don’t have things for,” which seem to attract Manguso most deeply. There’s a deep and dark humor to nearly every poem, the deadpan gallows humor of a true ironist caught in the midst of failed reconciliations: “Very large objects remind us of the possibility of the infinite, which has no size at all,” she writes knowingly, sympathetically. “But we understand it as something very, very large.”
