Ocular Proof

“Does staring into the black and white contours of a photo/ enable rapprochement with the unreality of one’s own life,” Ronk (Transfer of Qualities) asks in her latest collection, a darkly glittering study of image, knowledge, and perception. Commenting upon and extrapolating from the history of photography, the writings of thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, and more personal pictures, Ronk’s ekphrastic pieces on black-and-white photographs wring insight from the smallest compositional details. In “The Photographic Object” she writes, “it’s either dense shadow or a tree, either downhill or a camera tilt,/ ironic/ or a story hidden in what’s seen.” Ronk’s concentration is particularly acute when it comes to problems of representation, and photography’s’s lingering reality effect: a photograph “counts for more than it is” because “We cling to it.// Even photoshopped or cropped.” Her sonorous lines, long sentences, and agile syntax slow down and speed up the tempo of these poems, dilating the camera’s single slice of time, and gesturing toward the claustrophobia of its eternal present. Ronk is sometimes reticent to reveal the personal stakes of her poems—her language is, as ever, largely academic, even formalist, in tenor—but when she does, they cast her project in a new (and moving) light. “Behind the shuttered eye,” Ronk writes, “hazards and guesses, the bright and unprintable.” (Oct.)

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