In Civil Service

Civil Service
By Claire Schwartz
2022
Graywolf Press
89 pages

A parable of power and control set in a sterile future dystopia, Claire Schwartz’s Civil Service reads like an historical study of a faceless regime that has weaponized language to repress a nameless and generic – yet eerily familiar – society.

While Civil Service flashes a warning (layered within that dystopic narrative is an obvious analogy to our own political present) it’s neither simple enough to be an allegory nor geographically or temporally-specific enough to be satire. Rather, the collection offers an immersive lesson in how reality is brokered, bordered and twisted through simple tropes and memes. The figures that populate the poems are mostly types rather than people – the Dictator, the Curator, the Stenographer, the Censor, etc. There is also the ghostly “Amira”, notionally the main character/symbolic prisoner but more of a delicate, transitive sketch of a presence, both figuratively in action and literally in terms of a trick of the type font.

Zooming out from theme, Civil Service is also a finely torqued collection of verse. Language sweeps across meaning in constant, rich tides of metaphor, rendering it fleeting, like the rush of life peered at between thick prison bars. The book features several longer poems loosely fit around Amira and her relationship to the state apparatus and a textual incarceration. Meant to advance the subtle drama as extended stage directions, these poems are also rushes of language that haul the reader along like a sled on a slick and sharp slope while also suggesting the bonds of her fate of textual incarceration.

But the most effective pieces of writing in the collection are the condensed bits of thematic content that could function as standalone poems outside of the context of the collection (but certainly also fit snugly within). ‘Perennial’ offers an initially innocent portrayal of the Archivist as he “walks out of the book/and into the evening” to momentarily join a world where “[t]he flowers are screaming”. ‘Preferential Treatment’ stropes a cutting assessment of the life of the Censor in how he “uses the black crayon/to eradicate sex”.

In analyses like these, Schwartz accentuates the sombre soullessness of an uncivic square with bleak iconography. But she is, at the same time, summoning an inspiringly creative power in the achievement; the type you need to overthrow any tyranny that tries to stamp down on the life of the imagination.

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