House of Jars: Poems, by Hester L. Furey

Hubris and destruction

Furey shades these figures as prophets or yogis, in their own inexplicable fashion; near-religious figures in a Modernist 20th-century age seemingly based on reason and rationality, even if their public lives seem cut from a materialist cloth. Bugs, cancers, and sickness flit across their lives as if to signify spiritual power, the strange connection between illness and clarity. Where Williams purges “pyramids of bedbugs” in “A Doctor Visit”, the poem “Dog Days of 1925” features “bedbugs for spirit guides.”

Within these often-tragic historical characters, as well as the “Conjuring Moses” section of the book, the poet discovers hubris and destruction: once Oppenheimer witnesses Trinity’s official test, he sees “himself in universal scale, as if / he had ingested an entheogen.” Frida Kahlo wants to be a doctor, but this soon changes after her infamous 1925 accident. Rachel Carson becomes “the guardian of the insects” even while her breast cancer begins killing her, “the mass that tried to elbow her big heart / aside.” Near the end, Furey tilts her lens all the way back so the reader can witness the “original” prophet Moses and his own tragic fate, as well as that of scholar William James.

Theories of art

In “Three Theories of Art”, Furey quotes the anarchist definition of art: “the excrement / of process.” The poet felt inspired in part by Elizabeth Grosz’s Chaos, Territory, Art and her theory of artistry as “a willing engagement with chaos.” However, the biggest flaw of House of Jars may be that it isn’t wild or chaotic enough—the verse isn’t always ecstatic or passionate.

Instead, it sometimes reads as written in reflection, in careful, measured moments, not in a frenzy or fit of artistic inspiration. The poems are each broken up largely into long stanzas, the writing bordering on prose poetry, and while the book is only 73 pages, the effect is repetitive. The writer mentions in the preface that this is the first time she’d combined her academic studies with her poetry, and the result could use more experimentation and less of a dissertation’s sense of formality. The title poem especially is short, sweet, and closest to Grosz’s ideal of art as chaotic engagement: “another container / of light and air, agnostic / here in the house of jars.”

A fruitful collection

Nevertheless, House of Jars is the work of an intelligent and insightful mind. This collection should be fruitful for anyone searching for their own ecstatic truth in the detritus of the 21st century, especially if they enjoy historical rabbit holes and unexpected connections. If the collection doesn’t always work as a cohesive whole, as if in need of more religious ecstasy, pieces like “Bug Relativism” and the epic “Moses, Man of the Mountain” stick in the brain like the dead bug sitting on Dr. Williams’s hat. Furey successfully redefines the modern in House of Jars not as disillusionment, but as a perpetual journey for rational and irrational truth: “ever seeking / that which turned me novice, headless / then building my language boats, / triangulating my way home, / back to the imperishable stars.”