by Derek Graf
January 16, 2024
Derek Graf is the author of Green Burial, winner of the 2021 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award for a First or Second Book of Poetry. He poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sugar House Review, The Journal, and Sixth Finch. He serves as Clinical Assistant Professor of English at Yeshiva University.
Love is Colder Than the Lake; Nightboat Books; 112 pages; $17.95.
Liliane Giraudon’s Love is Colder Than the Lake (translated by Sarah Riggs & Lindsay Turner) is dedicated to the memory of the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose first feature film, Love is Colder Than Death (1969), serves as a prominent intertext for Giraudon’s most recent collection. Although Fassbinder might be a household name for cinephiles (many of his films can be found in the Criterion Collection), Love is Colder Than Death certainly does not rank among the filmmaker’s most well-known films, such as The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), or Fox and His Friends (1975), all of which would be much more likely candidates for that distinction. The relative obscurity of Fassbinder’s early film, coupled with Giraudon’s revision of its title for her collection, helps to lend Love is Colder Than the Lake its immediate sense of inscrutability, a book in which “the extra speaks elsewise of something else” (46).
But the mysterious elements of Giraudon’s collection have less to do with meaning than with the cognitive processes that underlie the act of reading: “before reading look at each page / as if it were a puddle” the poet instructs (28). This advice proves quite helpful, for throughout the collection, Fassbinder’s noir-inflected binary of love and death is enhanced with imagery of the natural world. Thus, it is Fassbinder’s cinema and the lake (its anonymity held in tension with the definite article) that guide the reader through these poems: “the lake inhabits the book” (91). Pages as puddles, books inhabited by lakes: the poet here is asking us to see poetry as liquid—its constant movement, its potential for reflection, its range of temperature. The reader submerges herself in Giraudon’s language and is rewarded with the bliss of drowning.
As does Fassbinder. In “Once and For Not All,” the third and final section of the collection, prose blocks are coupled with screenshots from Love is Colder Than Death, placing Giraudon’s language in direct conversation with Fassbinder’s images. While one might expect for the writing in this section to follow the same fragmented and isolated form as a movie still, Giraudon instead composes this section as a lyric essay, offering autobiographical and philosophical observations on her development as a writer. The images, then, serve as a starting point for the poet to express the self through mediated images—as well as memory. Indeed, one of Giraudon’s many strengths in this collection is her ability to diagnose the relationship between poetry and cinema: “how to show what’s off-screen in the poem” (19). What binds these two forms of expression is, ultimately, movement, which offers the reader/spectator “new forms of immersion” in the image (43). For Giraudon, poetry and cinema are one: “The poem sets up its camera and films. Neither restoration nor restitution. Perhaps a form of prolongation. To try to bring back to the light the buried images” (87). This isn’t metaphor. The kino-eye is also the poet’s eye: recording and splicing, cutting time to pieces and making it whole again. Shoring up fragments, giving substance to illusions: “sometimes it snows on the lake / a long travelling shot horribly slow” (61).
“Tell me exactly what you saw and what you think it means,” says Lisa (Grace Kelly) to her murder-obsessed Peeping Tom boyfriend L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart) in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). But for Giraudon what we see isn’t enough: both the poem and the film “show what’s offscreen,” what’s lost in the gaps between images. If “the words seek / to hide the sentences,” then “the form of a film depends also on the scenes that weren’t filmed, and which shadow those that were” (38, 83). The reader must “look closely at the poem / before reading it and after” to understand that “all the empty spaces between the words / mean more than the words” (58). Only through exacting concentration can the reader see what isn’t there—which is where meaning lies. Poetry and cinema exist in a state of harmonious rupture: the line-break and the jump-cut shift the reader and viewer from one image to the next without any preparation for what’s to come, thus creating association through disjunction: “things stay the same / only the composition changes” (59). Giraudon literalizes this idea in the collection’s second section, which repurposes language from the opening section in angled and fragmented typographical arrangements. The language is the same, but the arrangement has changed. What the reader gains, however, is the ability see these words from (literally) a new angle: not as poetry, exactly, but as text—graphic markings on a page. Like watching a film just for the cuts.
This remarkable alliance with cinema is only one of the many elements that distinguishes Giraudon’s collection from the vast terrain of contemporary poetry. Giraudon’s singular voice makes Love is Colder Than the Lake a compelling and memorable read. Returning to the third and final section of the book, Giraudon provides the reader with a candid description of how books such as this one come to exist: “Time passes. Buttercups scattered among the dead heads of the hydrangeas. Sudden saturation of clouds over a sky at first clear. I begin a book without a title. It’s the first time in my life that I begin a book without a title. Like a recurring dream, it comes back. In another setting, with the entrance of several characters onto the scene” (78). Like a Fassbinder film, or a Chantal Akerman film, or a Jean-Luc Godard film, Giraudon’s book is a film unfolding in the poet’s mind, paused and resumed, lost and found: “This time it’s a voice that says the title, I’ve lost the book, I search for it everywhere, for all its mistakes were actually quite beautiful” (78-79).
By this point, the reader understands that the “lost book” is the one we are holding in our hand, listening to a voice that shows us what only the poet or camera can see: “the modest observation / of movement in the trees” (46). If, as André Bazin said, cinema is defined by its contingency, its ability to capture the unexpected and unscripted, then for Giraudon, poetry is similarly defined by observation. The poet’s mind and the camera’s eye are all the artifice one needs to what’s beautiful, what’s lasting, in the mistakes.
©2024 Iron Oak Editions
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Poem on a Wire: The Poetics of Cinema in Liliane Giraudon’s Love is Colder Than the Lake
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