REVIEW: Approaching a Boundlessness of Being - on Joan by Jake Rose

JD Scott on how Rose's poetry collection refuses to fix Joan of Arc in any single form.

In Joan, the virtuosic collection by Jake Rose, Joan of Arc becomes both guise and something more slippery and veil-like, or to use the poet’s own words, a “...sapphire dusk draping its lace arias.” Sequenced in four sections, the voice of Joan falls somewhere between persona, dramatic monologue, and speculative poetry. These untitled poems meld into one another, tracing La Pucelle’s arcane peasant upbringing, her divine calling toward public action—her triumph, peak, and decline—and the inevitable martyrdom she is often most remembered for.

Joan’s journey begins in her birthplace of Domrémy. The shortest sequence in the book—despite accounting for thirteen years of the youth’s early life—lasts for only three pages. This is Joan in stasis, Joan of obscurity, the most unknowable Joan who preceded the saints and angels who propelled her:

young and slumped in the faceless hours

of august heat I would prick my thumb &

suck the blood out just to get closer than closeness

to some feeling of being beloved in my own body

instead of waiting for the stillness that only

comes in turning dreams swallowing

the spit as if it were holy water…

Joan’s latency and relationship with her own body acts as prodrome—an early symptom for the animus that will carry through these poems like a banner. Here, I mean animus both as vitality, breath, and driving energy—but also as the masculine interiority rising and reaching outward (“I used to wait to be plucked/out of gender and situation/to be entirely mirrorless like nature….”). As Joan activates and moves toward the Siege of Orléans to inspire her countryfolk, she speaks: “god sent me an absence to tend/a tiny hole of curiosity he didn’t have/but could only give to others….”

Beyond a few slick anachronisms (“sugar rim of fame and vanilla cherry/ice cream…”; “a little bloodspot of morse code…”; “I don’t/care if I’m/ever on a/post stamp…”), the Joan of this poemworld speaks from the embodied landscape of a fifteenth-century military campaign caravanning among trees, earth, and open air. It is a deceptively simple world with its “coin of sun,” its “blue muscles stamped with/an emblem..”, its “thistles and red iron bugles….”

Although the section titled “Vaucouleurs to Orléans” (lasting just a few months in 1429) is barely longer than those early years in her hometown, we meet the seventeen-year-old in all her resourcefulness and boldness amidst the panic and doubt of someone leaving her private world behind:

I am what I want which is more

than I could ever possibly weigh

the tiny rebellions we gave to ourselves

as a point of departure are wedged into lament

a new alphabet emerges now narrow &

full of plunging space

In the book’s lengthiest section—charting nearly a year in Joan’s life from Reims to Compiègne—Rose captures the youth’s phlogiston: an internal glow, righteous and already burning. Joan appears here as an armor-wearing icon on the edge of heresy and heroics, her life moving toward combustion, transformation, and sacrifice. This Joan seesaws between the profane and the divine: “how trashy is life but/how low a thing is heaven.”

What Rose does exceptionally well here is ground us in both Joan’s body and mind as they alchemize through the lyric. Sometimes we are privy to briefer self-reflective moments in the natural world (“...a bee stung me/with its fang of golden musk/I was turned toward on and brought/to a point of pain so abrupt/and infinite my sovereign.”) and sometimes we eavesdrop on weightier introspections as Joan views herself through the eyes of her retinue and rivals alike (“I lied before I reached/the end of purity I outgrew purity/entered valor left pity/regained character lasted briefly/in the arms of courage and then/wept along the long slide/of chartreuse evening sorrow…”). All throughout, Rose sustains the complexities of a Joan who is acting under divine guidance, blaspheming through her masculinity, and marching toward the end of both adolescence and a shockingly short life.

In the collection’s final section, we are taken to the place of Joan’s imprisonment in Rouen, which was the main headquarters of the English in France during the Hundred Years’ War. Although most of the poems in this collection share a uniformity (single-stanza poems—occasional couplets—all told in a similar cadence), the most stunning poem in the book spans over three pages of interrogation: each line beginning with “Asked….” While it feels like both a disservice to this poem to break it into excerpts—and compare it to Freytag’s climax—this moment captures all of Joan’s stalwartness, her resolve, her refusal to submit during the narrative of her life:

Asked if in my youth I went to run around in the fields with the other children

Asked if in my youth I had any great desire

Asked if I greatly wanted to be a man when I had come to France

Asked if I did not take the animals to the fields

Asked if I had heard the voice since Saturday

Asked what the voice had said to me on Saturday

Asked what the voice had said to me in my room when I went back

Asked if the voice forbade me from saying anything

Asked what the voice said to me on the last occasion

Asked if the voice had given me counsel on anything

Asked if it was the voice of an angel or the voice of a saint

The dexterity of this poem lies in momentarily removing us from Joan’s own interiority and placing us beside her during her inquisition. The repetition of the “Asked…” is negligible when compared to the myriad ways Joan is hounded about hearing voices, who these voices were, what these voices sounded and looked like—every aspect of the way she expressed herself—and the repeated requests for her own admission of guilt and submission. While both feeling bygone in its medieval jail cell setting and contemporary in its police-like interrogation, the past-tense colloquy reveals Joan’s own willpower and her refusal to surrender:

Asked if I wished to submit to and accept the decision

Asked if I would agree to submit myself to the ordinance

Asked if when the voices came I paid reverence to them absolutely

Asked if I always did what the voices asked

Asked if I ever did anything against the will and command of the angels

Asked how I knew that these were angels

Asked how I could tell it was a good or bad angel

Asked if I knew of any crime or fault for which I could or should die

Asked if I wished to submit to the verdict

Asked if I wished to submit my words and deeds to the verdict

Asked what warrant and what help I expected from the Lord

Asked if my counsel told me that I would be delivered out of

my present prison

Asked on what part of the body I embraced them

Asked if I wished to submit to the judgement for all that I said or did

whether it was good or evil

Asked if I believed myself subject

Asked if I had a command from my voices not to submit myself

Asked why I had taken male clothing

Asked for what reason I had taken it

Asked to speak truthfully

Asked if I would submit

Asked if I would submit

As the imprisoned Joan approaches her end of days, we nearly experience a return to her origins in Domrémy. Her body is chained (Rose even ends the book with a sequence of black-and-white photographs of a person in shackles—before a coda poem), yet her imagination and transportable mind provide liberation. The Joan-voice continues to ruminate on her body and if it can even be left behind (...the vermillion glued to my eyelids/and my matte black spleen I mostly/wait for the tiny holes in day through/which I pretend to escape and wonder/if later I will even remember them…”). In these apertures, we hear an echo of the earlier “tiny hole of curiosity”—not as absence now, but as a final, flickering passage between enclosure and release.

While a more predictable journey might have carried the reader’s hand to the pyre, Rose lingers in the prison for a while longer to complete our progress through Joan’s suffering, where “thirst is not like hunger it is much/worse and I have been thirsty/for so long from translating/myself into the perceptions of others….” Although captive, the voice tells us, “I am inventing a Joan now/who could survive this suffering….”

As Rose eschews the easy spectacle of the stake, Joan takes us to a point where identity, body, time, and narrative constraints have been exhausted. At the moment of maximum confinement, containment itself collapses. Joan approaches her boundlessness of being, where institutions (church, state, gender) fail to confine her. At last, we reach the ontological shift which Joan has already moved into: myth, symbol—banner and banner-wielder alike—a multiplicity of meanings. We move beyond the final paradox, where everything that remains in the French peasant’s (and future saint’s) life has passed its limits:

meet me in the alley where

the wild mint grows with

the little halo of favors

that nobody owes

there is nothing left

that is no longer infinite

What remains is the accomplishment of a poetry collection that refuses to fix Joan of Arc in any single form, instead allowing her voice to scintillate between body and divine symbol, canonized text and apocrypha—an animating presence that refuses submission and containment—exceeding the boundaries placed upon her.