1.

Even with no Tonalist paintings on the covers of each of these two spellbinding books, an affiliation between the contemporary poet, Andrew Mossin, and this late 19^th-century art movement would proclaim itself. The two paintings, one by Arthur Wesley Dow and the other by Dwight William Tryon, shine forth as if to say: Transcendental eyeball these images. Feel down to your fingertips the aesthetic ambitions of this movement which ruled American painting from the end of the Civil War to the Armory Show, when a wide range of painters sought to chasten the transcendentalist longings of Emerson and Thoreau while implementing new ways of painting, transforming solitary fields and trees and clouds and coastlines and abandoned farmhouses into spiritual states.

2.

Further landscapes await inside the books. Incidental moments of light and water, darkness and distance. These, as much as whatever the poem is mid-telling, are the poet’s true testament, are what the books, ultimately, are about, pages of tonalist perception. Tonalist landscapes are shorn of narrative elements. No human figure distracts contemplation with a narrative. Tonalist landscapes are somber, both rapt and elegiac, imbued with a feel that has been read broadly as a response to the monumental death toll of the Civil War. As if no one’s in the painting because no one’s left. The canvasses are devoted to the unified effect of overlapping warm and cold colors under grey and pearly skies. What one manual for painters from the period calls “scintillation.” Mossin’s extraordinary books draw us deep into the still vital 19^th-century art tradition. Whitman at the Bardo evokes the often-neglected late Whitman, a painterly poet himself, not without Tonalist touches, immensely aware of ghosts, pursuing a scaled back transcendental desire no less fervid for its muted interplay of emotional coloration. For the Tonalists painters, it could be said that the landscapes of the northeast had become a bardo, had any of them known of such a place in their wanderings through Eastern thought. If not bardo qua bardo, at the least, they suspected that in less than dramatic landscapes could be the intersection of the here and the beyond. Sky, water, trees, fields, shadows, rocky coastlines could still hold some of the rapturous aura of the Hudson River School, but chastened, internalized, critiqued and reimagined in a private devotional sphere, in obscure places suffused with gleams and shadows and suffering, the kind of places which Mossin innately seems to know, and which in both of these volumes are the heart of his imaginative accomplishment. The following lines could be from a painter’s notebook, something Francis Murphy or Barge Harrison or William Gedney Bunce might remind himself when thinking of the power of painting to fuse inner and outer worlds:  
3.

Andrew Mossin’s great strength is the twinning of eye and heart, of landscape and thinking. These two collections dramatize consciousness as it finds and unfolds itself within the frame of the natural world, water, light, trees, clouds, isolated exactitudes, a world which presents itself to the mind, its parts bound together in a single aesthetic effect. These poems are like a Tonalist painting, where beneath the chromatic differentiation is a unity of color, as if black has been scattered through the darker tones, and white through the lighter. For Mossin, sky and earth share a tint. He has mastered a forlorn but often ecstatic handling of atmospheric effects. He brings the otherworldly close but is scrupulous in his deference to a verifiable world. So then: What’s with the bardo? The bardo, even as mere trope, would seem to shunt attention to the venerable and ancient East. But then, we are in a poetry of indirection and intimation. Mossin’s bardo, or at least the entrance to it, is nowhere near Tibet. It’s homegrown and elusive, inextricable from the phenomenon of secular life, as close as a turn of thought. Further, the appearance of the bardo has a weirdly historical rightness. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, from whence the popular understanding of the bardo derives, should more properly be considered as Donald Lopez remarks as a work of American theosophy. (A book unknown to Tibetans, assembled outside Tibet, by an American theosophist). Mossin brings this world-renowned religious text back home. His bardo arises from the Tibetan compilation, from American post-Civil War traumascape, from the wavering of Tonalist landscapes in and out of objectivity. But the bardo’s most immediate origins are the desolations of the poet’s own life in modernity. DC in the 1880s bleeds into DC in the 1960s. (Mossin is explicit about the porousness of temporal boundaries.) The intrusions of other epochs amplify the present. Whitman himself is both everywhere and nowhere. (And would he have it any other way?) This complex temporality, combined with a commitment to historical specificity, brings the poem to another cultural response to the traumatic loss of a generation, spiritualism. Mossin inherits a grief saturated landscape, Civil War dead still adrift, many of whom Whitman tended, but for Mossin there are keener, more intimate losses. His extraordinary conjuring of his deceased parents is deeply felt and subtly rendered. His career-long attentiveness to accurate renditions of mental phenomenon serve him particularly well in summoning those posthumously present. His mother’s ghost is both quotidian and otherworldly:
4.

Mossin is by nature cautious, his religiosity often filtered through appropriately secular discourses of critical theory, which is where, after all, religious mania goes to get a grip on itself. His preoccupations with light, water, color, and mood keep him on the materialist side of any cosmic totality. He does, however, describe himself as a “mystic realist.” Otherworldly lines that can survive his philosophical skepticism reach us with a particular authority. Perhaps only a poet as devoted to the flow of the sensory as it passes into thought and from there to nothingness can speak so believably of the beyond:
5.

With his gnomic blending of exact observation and hints of hidden forces at work in nature, another transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau was held in high esteem by prominent Tonalist painters in the post-Civil War years. They felt confirmed in their subject matter and their method, finding in the fields, trees, streams and skies of New England, upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and even Cincinnati, a still sustaining underlying transcendental orientation, albeit tempered by abandonment, by the hollows in local economies in the 1860s and 70s. Mossin evokes Thoreau several times in The Common World. Thoreau embodies what Mossin seeks to affirm by the commonality that his title proposes. Mossin’s Thoreau is the somber, precise explicator of the natural world who holds in his heart a dead brother. Mossin’s poetics, exemplified by his daybook sequences, aligns him with Thoreau’s Journals, but also to the experience of solitude, bereavement, and the world of light familiar to the darker precincts of transcendentalism.

A not quite cruel irony is at work: Mossin’s common world is distinguished by the isolation of selves within it. We are more often in the vacated presence of others than with them. And as with Tonalists paintings, the mood of the poetry mingles sadness and wonder. The poems gathered in A Common World were written before and during the composition of Whitman at the Bardo. They are the world from which the specter of Whitman arises. Mossin’s Whitman is not so much the poet of the earlier pre-Civil War period. Mossin is drawn to late Whitman of the DC and Camden years, the Whitman of frailty and hopes for health, the celebrant of less expansive affirmations, who though stricken can praise a glass of champagne and ice on a hot day. Mossin, like late Whitman, can be almost posthumous in his perspective on the world of the living, but also like Whitman, Mossin is not essentially elegiac. Loss is a painful prelude to revelation. Mossin’s poetry is relentless in its pursuit of the precisely perceived transcendent. A particularly galvanizing assay into the unknown is “Parallel Suites for the Re-Recognition of Innate Form.”
That mud, the dark color, which, imagined as wet, picks up on the sky’s light, is the sign of a double alienation, from eternity, where we are not, and from those we once knew, who may have flown to eternity. The poet expresses his metaphysical curiosity through the sensorium of the natural world: mud, barley, grass, and the almost divine capacities of light and color to alter our sense of where we are. Light and color are continuously transfiguring powers. Given the desolations Mossin evokes with a discretion so exacting it could pass for concealment, these powers have work to do. The poet draws upon with quiet emphasis the boons and tragedies of a life lived in a profound exile from some other life that might have happened and didn’t. Unbearable psychic and cultural displacements underlie Mossin’s enormous imaginative effort to create a poetry that recreates the world. Obsessively the poet imagines a transformed self within that world, a self “attuned to astonishment.” Color and light are spiritual principals. They are what allow for understanding and for sentiment. There are rarely passages that do not touch upon light in the poem’s articulation of what it means to be a thinking being in the world:
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Though written during the composition of A Common World, Whitman at the Bardo feels different. Its lines are shorter. Its pace is quicker. Its concerns press on with a certain necessity. The title recalls Whitman’s interest in aligning his ongoing “new Bible” with religious thought both ancient and contemporary. His fundamental purpose, he said, was religious. He absorbed Egyptian and Hindu notions; he dedicated a poem to a Sufi dervish; he presented himself in a tradition of prophets and religious writers ready to bring ancient spiritual essences into the age of secularism and science. By placing Whitman “at,” and pointedly not “in” the bardo, Mossin places Whitman at modernity’s turning point, confronting an older world of religious belief from a newly emerging place that would seem to be beyond it. Mossin is “at” the Bardo as well, revisiting charged landscapes from his past, in Ohio, in DC. The writing of the poem is the enduring of a test as to whether he wants to return or can refrain from returning. Mossin’s imaginative integrity is in this “at,” but not “in.”

His philosophical disposition brings him to the brink of invisible worlds, but not further. What we know of the beyond we know by means of light and water, as they appear in their proximity to some heightened or purified understanding of the fundamental templates of human life, the sun, the course of a river, the changing of seasons. Whitman for Mossin is not the national poet, not the homoerotic poet, not even this religious poet syncretizing past traditions for a secular religion, though that may be close to Mossin’s heart, but as has been suggested, the poet of frailty and precisely delineated (and lineated) intimations of the beyond. Whitman is the poet who has, like Mossin, endured a life in DC, in Brooklyn, in and around Philly, and a Civil War, in that the contemporary poet’s own life was shaped by another civil war, the Greek civil war. Catastrophic griefs link him to late style Whitman, a poet of indirection, intimation, intimacy with death, and gratitude for the miracle of health.

One thing that’s notable and intensified by the fluid gracefulness of the lineation of Whitman at the Bardo is that we are, page upon page, at the interpenetration of realms. The boundary line between here and elsewhere, so evident in A Common World, is heightened here. By way of Whitman, Mossin opens the poem to other temporalities, other spirits in what we might think of, here, as the bardo of the postmodern long song. Pound, Williams, Niedecker, readily slip into and out of the consciousness of the poem. Encouraged by the shuttle of time frames into and out of his present, Whitman at the Bardo maps out Mossin’s own oneiro-geography as a space between two rivers, the Chesapeake and the Ohio. The poet’s piercing and evocative lines readily mix the cultural past, poetic precursors or fellow souls in the bardo, the poet’s personal memory, with what constitutes—both books taken as one—a single extraordinary hymn to light, a hymn which unites Mossin in his modernity with mystical traditions and sacred literatures from around the globe, while remaining distinctive in his rhapsody. Mossin is consistently pressed by his own darkness toward the ecstatic, speaking, here, with and through Whitman’s Calamus poems:
7.

These new books lay out with imaginative grace and conceptual richness a stance toward reality, one deeply suspicious of large spiritual claims, resolutely attentive to reading the natural world as a sign system, while living a life at the edge of an elsewhere. As readers of Mossin we are wonderstruck and grieving, but we are also always thinking and imagining. Rhapsodic moments arise and dissipate within these serial meditations, philosophical in their diction, stately in their unfolding. The dazzle of isolated places, the precise perceptions, the flow of feeling, unveil a fundamental situation which the poetry inexhaustibly explores. The poet is careful never to sing for too long in a transcendental register, but ideals of correspondence, of hidden agonies and transformation, of the fallenness of creation, of hermetic possibilities arising from the reading of natural phenomenon, of the romance of hidden perfections, suffuse Mossin’s tonalist landscapes of isolation and shadows and scintillating light. The contemplation of and recovery of insignificant moments as scenes of secretly transcendent beauty, the quality of attention such places bring to the fore, the evocation of a personal self, curtailed by experience as it dissolves into a chastened but enhanced feeling of being, unites both Mossin’s volumes into a singular and extraordinary poetic meditation. Ancestral deaths glide by. Dreams, undramatic and poignant, drift past amid the ongoing and quietly heroic, all too awake acts of mind. Mossin has long been a master of “states of otherness in the ‘I’,” of what he identifies as a “mystical realism.” These volumes dramatize in touching detail “the pull of the temporal at a distance from any root formation of self” (Whitman at the Bardo 125). What is imaginative and moving in that formulation is Mossin’s sense of that “root formation of self.” Not that the poet claims to draw strength or wisdom or feel cursed by it, but he renders over and over the feel that that self is there, perhaps at a distance, but not broken, not inaccessible, just steadfast, there, lending its light to the shaping of poems.

Taken all together, Andrew Mossin’s body of work resembles a lifelong serial postmodern Noh play. We are on an uncertain pilgrimage. We are honoring abandoned sites of the sacred. We are painfully stripping the self of its insubstantial attachments. We are finding ourselves as a ghost among ghosts, of family, lost love. We witness obscure sources of psychic force, in a landscape that comes to be in Tonalist masterpieces of light and dark. His is an art of the perpetually arriving passing moment. Andrew Mossin brings to life the fullness and complexity of the past, most especially in these recent volumes, the American transcendentalist past, and he seems to find there, confirmed, his own elusive sense of being, as well as the poetics of a life lived now, rich with ghosts, traumas, turns of extraordinary thought, and hard-won loves.

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Joseph Donahue's most recent volume of poetry is The Palace of Boundless Cold, forthcoming from Selva Oscura. Other recent publications include This to That and Thus: Poems 1983-1998, Disfluency: Collected Uncollected Poems 1973-2023, and volumes four and five of his ongoing poem cycle, Terra Lucida. He is the co-translator of First Mountain, by Zhang Er. With Edward Foster he edited The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry, 1970-2000. He teaches creative writing at Duke University.