reviewed on October 17, 2024

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Across its three multi-sectioned long-poems, each fascinating in its own way, Mandel’s stunning debut takes up the idea of textuality and translation as an entrance point into personal and public histories, so that engagement with texts—on the part of Mandel and others—becomes a distinct way of knowing and experiencing; in The Grid, that is, Mandel constructs meshes of association that grid together history, geography, literature, abstract expressionism, psychology, classicism, biography, and autobiography, all woven through with Mandel’s impressive intellectual reach and well-stropped wit.

 

The title section is the book’s most fully and compellingly developed, a lyric-essay biography of Brooklyn College classicist Alice Kober (1906 - 1950), decoder of the ancient Greek syllabic script known as Linear B.  Overshadowed during her lifetime by her male colleagues, Kober’s relatively invisible academic labor re-surfaces across “The Grid” in Mandel’s brilliant excavation of her work, research drawing in large part on Kober’s archives at the University of Texas; the result is one part literary criticism, one part academic farce, and one part posthumous psychoanalysis, akin in tone and topic to Pale Fire, Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” Srikanth Reddy’s Underworld Lit.

One appreciates this heady mélange on almost every page, but here is Mandel discussing the relationship between Kober and fellow classicist Michael Ventris:

 

He suggests in a posthumously published essay that she was ‘purposefully stopping short’ of making correspondences with sounds.  He means that she refused to engage in the guesswork that hindered her colleagues--and that allowed him to decipher the script.  A single page in her workbooks shows that at least once she dabbled in sound speculation.  It raises the question of whether she purposefully stopped short in another way: whether her immovable modesty rested on the columns of a monumental architecture of self-hindrance, a pylon temple (she never learned Egyptian) of rigid shame.  But geometry is not depth psychology.

 

While such subject matter might readily have lent itself to a close and esoteric collection, The Grid routinely widens out from Kober to capture by association the historical and geographical mystery of Linear B itself.  “Disaster, not wonder, preserved Linear B,” Mandel writes.  “Something interfered with the annual purge of the tablets.  Something collapsed the palaces that housed them and buried them in time.”  Ranging across history with Cantos-like reach, Mandel links the existence of clay tablets on Crete to the Nazi invasion of that island in May of 1941, noting at the same time a delightful connection to literary history: “Greek, British, and ANZAC troops were routed, among them Evelyn Waugh and Patrick Leigh Fermor.”

 

At moments, The Grid indulges in somewhat overwritten grandiosity: “One of her graphs repeats over and over the notation

0      , 49 times in 49 gridded boxes,” Mandel explains.  “The superscript makes the zero unbearable.  Repetition of nullity failure.”  Such moments are rare, but they exude nonetheless the off-putting, overly academic bloviation of Berlantian theory.

 

More often, The Grid is simply a pleasure, its remarkable erudition matched with a facility for the wide-angle tone-sketch as much as the one-line gem.  In the collection’s third section, for instance, titled “Letters of Last Resort,” Mandel explores the idea of belatedness—of lingering, of ending, of eschatology—through a kind of composite apocalypse:
 

            Someone was asleep in the compartment.

 

            Dew had formed around the flange.

 

            The klaxons were sounding,

 

            the prime minister was writing a letter to the ocean.

 

            They didn’t want to die here, in a cheap hotel,

 

            while the telex machine spit out yesterday’s weather.

 

            After the itching ended, the earth was burning up all over her skin.

 

On the previous page, Mandel delivers one of the saddest, most sweeping one-liners I have encountered in some time: “the empire is out of gin.”

 

It is in its third section, as well, that The Grid turns most immediately toward autobiography, as Mandel tropes the classical mode of the ars poetica in a way that feels both arch and appropriately epic but never aggrandizing:

 

Most of your poems, it seemed to you, formed around a borrowed phrase,

 

a citation you knew and did not know where to put to rest.

 

You worried that this nacreous quality had become a tic.

 

You were under a sort of house arrest,

 

reading travel essays behind the closed blinds.

 

Because of its intellectualism, and because of its unflinching historical orientation, The Grid is likely to be considered “niche” reading, as the TikTok generation would have it; it seems to me, though, yet another astonishing and beautifully idiosyncratic collection from Changes Press, steeped in a kind of classical learning one had no longer thought possible.  The Grid is Mandel’s first book, but I am already eager to see what he does next.