The title of Veronica Golos’s collection of poems addressing the noetic underbelly of war, specifically that of the war in Iraq, pulls one to the many ideas about silence that have formed the bedrock of much intellectual thought in the last 100 years.

When Golos employs the word “silence” she immediately establishes a certain contextuality with the works of Wittgenstein (“about which we cannot speak, we must consign to silence”) and John Cage, whose aleatory stylings suggested that the 20th century's predominant ethos of commercially-driven industrial noise was, in its very randomness, the heart of wisdom, capable of subverting and supplanting the most deeply rooted religiosities of text (particularly when it came to the religions of the book).

For anything to be sacred, it must transcend naming. The sacred is ineffable. The wisdom texts of the three great Middle Eastern religions come together on that point, and they proclaim that God does not have limits; hence naming and names would define and ultimately limit the all-encompassing, all-powerful essential beingness that the notion of God encompasses.

The notion of the ineffable and the sacred are invoked at the very beginning of Golos’ collection of tight, spare lyrics. Part One begins with a collection, “News of the Nameless,” in which the poems address the victims of war.

The first impression that one has is that the individuals are suddenly reduced to anonymity through their dismemberment by improvised explosive device (IED), the experience of which is evoked in “Poem of Three.”

The second impression, however, is something more disturbing: the knowledge of the ineffable is only possible through radical transformation, which can be intellectual and spiritual, but which is more powerful when it is literal, and involves the actual nail and glass-shrapnel spewing device that, when strategically placed under the gas tank of a vehicle, adds a fireball and a moment of purgation and transcendence into the equation. The car bomb triggers the kind of untoward and unwelcome wisdom that accompanies the death of a mother in childbirth.

Golos suggests that human speech is incapable of expressing the existential condition and the state of “un-beingness” that accompanies war, particularly a violent internecine war. The poem, “The City: Juarez, 2010” involves the voices of the desert and the wind, which are the only witnesses of the fate of human beings as they meet violent deaths at the hands of human beings who have dehumanized their fellow men and women.

The other sections of part one, “Eden Is Ruin,” and “The Silence,” continue the interplay of earth and humanity, and reinforce the idea that forces of nature are the only elements that can articulate what happens to people after death. They can do so because they are part of the decomposition process, and their eroding force reduces individuals back to particulate form, that is then subsumed into the great “one”—a unity with nature.

Part Two, “Broken,” contains a series of “Veil” poems that create a tension between the revealed and the unrevealed, and suggest the boundaries between the exposed and the hidden. The poems are spare and elegant, and they echo the ideas of part one, that wisdom is not something that can be expressed with human speech, and the very unnameableness of it is something that can be echoed in a metaphor such as a veil, or the curtain covering the Holy of Holies.

The presence of veils is a palpable metaphor of the noetic, and the indication that behind it lies infinite wisdom.

Perhaps most disturbing, however, is the realization that the wisdom that Golos refers to is not only ineffable, but also only achievable in the face of tremendous carnage and horror as one finds in the Iraq war and in the Mexican drug wars. Golos’s vision is bold and the suggestions and ideas laid bare by the images and interactions in this collection are haunting.