The poet’s disciplined or “particularizing” attention is contrasted to the attention of the doctors and nurses, “all the precise data they collected from my specific body.” This data, he thinks, “had nothing to do with me, really,” even as he recognizes that this is by necessity, that it is impossible to take in everything. But by reading and writing poems—and, in the case of the poet, by recording his reading experience—we get to try. The impulse to record, the possibility of capturing, via art or criticism (one of this novel’s, and Greenwell’s, primary modes), is viewed with less pessimism here than in his earlier work, where even the description of a boy on a train induces a deconstructionist’s anguish:
Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But that wasn’t what it felt like when I looked back at the boy, wanting a last glimpse of him; it felt like a loss. Whatever I could make of him would diminish him, and I wondered whether I wasn’t really turning my back on things in making them into poems, whether instead of preserving the world I was taking refuge from it.
The absence of this line of questioning from Small Rain is at once affirming and disquieting: there is more faith, in this prose, in the redemptive power of art-as-attention; and less concern that, in seeking refuge from the world, one misses anything. {read}