Review by Alex Andriesse

AND THE WEST WAS NOT SO FAR AWAY
by Brad McDuffie

Des Hymnagistes Press
P.O. Box 41271
Lafayette, LA 70504
ISBN 978-0-9822693-2-9
2009, 64 pp., $12.00
http://deshymnagistes.blogspot.com

Maybe it’s a truism but it’s not untrue: American poetry has never been much known for its poetic “movements,” or for what the French call “schools” of poets as though they were talking about schools of fish. I think Borges once elaborated on this, and he decided that he envied us.

On the one hand, this freedom might indeed feel liberating. After all, “movements” are often paradoxically stagnant. On the other hand, it means a reader never knows what a new poet is going to do with the language. Picking up a first book of poems—especially, perhaps, a first book of poems from a small press—is a shot in the dark, and sometimes real violence seems to be done. In this case, however, the surprise is a pleasant one.

Brad McDuffie is an unusually American poet and his first book, And the West Was Not So Far Away, speaks with the inflections of Robert Lowell and Robert Penn Warren, James Dickey and (perhaps, most of all) the Methodist Hymnal. But these poems don’t simply borrow voices; they blend them into something new. McDuffie’s voice is truly contemporary, but its high lyrical, high lonesome style is not a style we’ve come to expect.

So I could easily make a long list of the tired “poetical” subjects that these poems wonderfully do not engage. I could point out, for instance, that McDuffie does not use the word “revenant,” nor does he write poems about Sigmund Freud or overuse Latin words derived from botany, nor does he have many poems that take place in bed. But it’s probably better to offer some positive form of praise.

Better to say, maybe, that McDuffie’s lyricism drives this book into open country—into places that I haven’t heard from in a long time. He isn’t afraid of the American language or its deeply personal music, its weird mixture of the popular, the vulgar, and the allusively abstruse. The opening lines of “Cross-Examination” sound like an old song coming on the car radio late at night:

When it comes to sadness, darling, plead
no contest, I know God’s jealous heart by heart.
I memorize the starless nights like scripture
reciting their blank

verses to other lovers in visions…

While the poem “Gethsemane,” with its wonderful opening landscape colored by memory and desire, give a touch of Dylan Thomas to a Hudson River scene:

The lights on the suspension of the mid-Hudson
Bridge mottle like candles on the black waters
Below.

Throughout, And the West Was Not So Far Away is tapped into the spirit of place, ranging from the Hudson Valley to the French Mediterranean. Many of the poems take place as a starting point for metaphysical meditation, and leave the reader somewhere new and strange at poem’s end. Even the book’s cover (among other pleasures, the West is attractively designed) makes a collage of a Mediterranean Village and what looks to be a New England beach.

It won’t surprise anyone that “the West” is a major motif of the book. Though McDuffie’s “West” appears in unlikely places—as much in the sound of Emmylou Harris’s voice as in a certain slant of light as in “the lunar plains of Nevada.” In

“A Meditation on My First Tour de France,” we find the West very much abroad:

In Saintes-Maries we carry you into the sea
and you dive deep beneath the Old Church
keeping watch on the horizon,
the gold waters shimmering in the West,
the relic of the setting…

McDuffie’s finest poems move like this. We seem to be watching the daily world with a calm eye when suddenly a metaphysical trap is sprung. First the ordinary:

Driving in grey silence down Hudson, we fol-
low you on through to Sundown, rivers attend-
ing our way up Rt. 28A.

And then a sudden lyrical blast:

               My lost
mariner of time needles over the neck
of the West in every direction, cracked
like crystal over

the mainspring.

This is “On Through to Sundown” (one of the book’s finest poems), but such flashes of recondite lyric brilliance are everywhere, as in an image of “Sir Walter Raleigh weighing smoke on scales” or, in a poem for Ansel Adams, a mountain slope shadowed “like a woman before she’s known.”

The West is filled with such daily intimacies. Many poems feature the names of friends and family members, idiosyncratic people and places. Usually, I would find this irritating, but somehow it works wonders for McDuffie. “Visiting Coney Island,” for example, ends with a moving picture of the poet’s children (and a subtle self-portrait):

On the edges the serpentine Cyclone haunts
The silent frame, paused as before the dead
Fall of the coaster clacking down the tracks
And the screams of delight cast over the sands

Where Anna and Jonah make small pillars
And I chase the screaming gulls.

With eyes to the sea one might imagine
                                                         things never change

As the book progresses (assuming you read it in some vaguely linear order), the reader gets to know these names, gets to know the poet’s corner of the world, and the poet’s idea of the West.

Yet even if McDuffie seems to favor flights into high Romanticism—into the overtly well-wrought metaphysical turn of phrase—the poems that I have so far found myself rereading and retaining are the simplest ones. Particularly, “Staining the Adirondack Chairs in Late July,” a great mid-summer Hudson Valley poem. To quote in full:

My children are spondees
running through the fresh cuts
of our front lawn. As July sets
with the sun, I am on one knee
staining the Adirondack chairs
under the oak tree, just off Phillies Bridge.
The days are endless with summer,
but thunder clouds line up beyond Shawangunk,
a horizon of shadows beyond the Catskills.
Switching knees, I stain all visible
angles. Glossing a stranger’s initials
knifed into the wood, their voices call
as those in day-dreams, bewaring the distant rumbles.
Rain and fumes mince black clouds with westwinds.

Certain passages in “Grace Rituals,” too, about the death of a friend’s father, are gripping in their exact simplicity:

In his notebook your father
marked the weekly catch
with a hand steadied in resistance:

A simple “—” for nothing,
and an even simpler notation
of size and weight

for the days on which a trout would rise.

Or, in another passage of ordinary exactness, a passage in a poem called “Fidelity”:

At dawn we watched the blue jays at the feeder
making clothesline dives from the Holt’s white crape-myrtle
tree, winged ribbons

they hide in the silver stars of the live oak.

In such sketches of small things, I find McDuffie is at his best. They’re the sort of poems that bring us back to the world without being merely humdrum records of the poet’s everyday life.

Rather, with Warren and Lowell and James Dickey as models, McDuffie seems to see poetry as a way of engaging in language with what it is to be alive—a sentiment I don’t think the poet would shy away from. I might say: It’s all so intimate, but without the slither of intimacy. Or I might quote the poet Donald Junkins, who writes of him, “Brad McDuffie has the knack of getting real emotion into his poems because he is willing to be intimate, and his words come out of the intimacy which is beyond emotion…it is a huge and life-sustaining thing.”

____________

Alex Andriesse is a translator and a poet. He currently lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Review by Angela Micheli Otwell

BESTIARY
by Elise Paschen

Red Hen Press
P.O. Box 40820
Pasadena, CA 91114
ISBN 978-1597091312
2009, 80 pp, $16.95
www.redhen.org

I received Bestiary (uncorrected proof) by Elise Paschen for review from Rattle a long time ago. I received two books that day, the other of which I read and reviewed fairly promptly. I believe it was providence that I didn’t get to this one until recently.

Between when I received the book and today, my cat died, some of my best friends had a baby, my grandfather died, my mother died, and my peers began to become grandparents. I’ve been firmly drawn into a biological world that I really haven’t inhabited for much of my life.

So. The cerebral side of me loves this book! The language is clear, each idea or message unmistakable, but the text is artfully studded with alliteration, consonance, rhyme, and other linguistic devices. One gets the impression that Ms. Paschen writes much like her mother (a prima ballerina) danced. She makes it look easy, but I’m sure there was a great deal of practice and effort behind the scenes. However she achieves it, though, Ms. Paschen’s meaning is never obscured by the wordplay and the wordplay never seems contrived or artificial.

As an example, “Moving In” contains the this playful passage:

Two hammers, two flashlights, two pots for tea,
a pair of ironing boards (yours, unused),
plus several teams of cutlery.
Each object, once spotted, seems reproduced.

I love the image of teams of cutlery (spotted?) pulling a pair of ironing boards.

“Disappearing Act” is another favorite of mine, with its gentle rhythm and haunting repetition:

The elsewhere husband doesn’t care.

Inside their life, she’s on her own,
Inhabiting the house, the air.
They share their meal, both unaware,
each one distracted by the phone.
The elsewhere husband doesn’t care…

Such simple, clear language! Such beautiful use of rhythm and rhyme!

“Feast for the Living” joyfully winds it’s way through a meal:

he would declare, “Let the wine flow,” and we,

his family and friends, would travel down
a garnet river, bubbling, rippling, clinking
under the wind-blown stars, swapping the stories
of our shared adventures, the tales of places
he had navigated across the globe.

But it’s the “beast” part of Bestiary that engaged me most. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, defines bestiary as follows:

1. A medieval collection of stories providing physical and allegorical descriptions of real or imaginary animals along with an interpretation of the moral significance each animal was thought to embody. A number of common misconceptions relating to natural history were preserved in these popular accounts.
2. A modern version of such a collection.

This “modern version bestiary” spoke to the parts of me that have recently been forced to acknowledge primordial biological imperatives, mostly sickness and death in my case.

However, “Monarch” refers to a fetus cocooned within a womb, “Engagement” feels “hormonal” to me, and “Barn Owl and Moon” is tense and sexual. “Behind the Swan” refers to Leda and the Swan from Greek mythology and contains more pain in just a few skillfully crafted lines than I’ve seen in whole books of confessional poetry on the subject of rape. Birth is a major theme in the book but one I don’t feel I can speak to directly and can only observe from afar, not having children myself. Still, the language is compelling. “Trapeze” moves from the swinging of a garden gate in spring to a baby’s movement in the womb.

In “The Broken Swan,” Ms. Paschen describes her mother’s physical decline:

When my mother’s body is seized with uncontrollable
twitching, she begins to reminisce about dancing in Venice.

And later:

since my father died: every day wearing the same black tee-shirt,
demanding, “Where are my pills?” or “Turn on the TV!”

We are all beasts in a way, subject to the laws of biology and consumed by needs that loom larger and narrower as our lives draw near the end. But this ballerina is still on stage, and the audience, poet or reader, can only watch, helpless, unable to alter the tragic choreography.

“Ash” and “Threshold” refer to Ms. Paschen’s father’s death. I still have my father, and part of me doesn’t even want to look in this direction. But it is very likely that he will die before me and I won’t be able to avoid facing a world without him then. I very much want to retreat to the cerebral and not face this particular bit of biological truth. I feel I am much like the young raccoon in “Raccoon on a Branch”:

The creature stares straight at us. A dog barks.
The animal limps away, climbs a trunk.
He fumbles, ascends to a higher branch,
looks down, trembling, unfocused, blinks his eyes,
unaccustomed to the blazing sun. Leaving
behind the raccoon, clinging close to limb,
we understand he wants no company.

In solitude, it is easy to ignore how we are like the beasts, to ignore our own biology, our own mortality. In relationship, it is impossible to ignore that we are like beasts, frail creatures subject to natural laws, needs, hormones, disease, and death.

Ms. Paschen apparently shares my hope, though, in a God that transcends nature and death and will make all things new. From “Mary of Magdala”:

He stands alone. His words, like fish,
swim through my bones. So I will follow.

and:

Where you seek permanence is death.
Where you seek change, there you find life.

We are not just beasts. We live in a fallen world but there is hope. The hope is not of our own making or of our design. Although it challenges the legs we try to stand on, it breathes new life into our hearts.

Bestiary is a literary gem, and I highly recommend it.

____________

Angela Micheli Otwell is an artist/writer living in Greensboro, Georgia. You can find her at www.amopage.com .

Review by Alvin Malpaya

VOYEUR
by Rich Murphy

Gival Press, LLC
P.O. Box 3812
Arlington, VA 22203
ISBN 9781928589488
2009, 85 pp., $15.00
www.givalpress.com

More basic to its definition than even its sexual elements, the term voyeur—which, in its original French, simply denoted “one who sees”—carries the implication that a deviate of such leanings must himself be unseen. The voyeur should not be invisible, strictly speaking, even if true invisibility were somehow made possible. He should only be hidden, a distinction that leaves open the possibility of being discovered, which is essential to the voyeur’s gratification. None of this is to say that a typical voyeur ever wishes to be discovered, consciously or not. But if in his mind the reward isn’t somehow commensurate with the risk—and, in his distorted mind, it likely is—the risk, especially with what’s at stake, only intensifies the need for delicacy and calculation when attempting the enterprise. So in this way, a certain degree of control, or perhaps the illusion of control, is restored to a person who has, by every other measure, lost it completely.

Although the speaker found in Voyeur, Rich Murphy’s new book of poems, is not a typical voyeur, he resembles such a person just enough fundamentally to carry the title. He is, of course, elusive and inconspicuous—the pronoun I, for instance, is used only eleven times throughout the book’s sixty-seven poems. The careful construction of these mostly brief poems betrays, furthermore, a personality of extreme deliberateness and calculation, someone who controls language obsessively, as if in compensation for his inability to halt his often dark and desultory imagination: “My pornography,” he states in the title poem, “has arrested / enough marriages and mates to occupy / a thousand brothels . . . I pan from coast to coast / and bedrooms frame acts of the American / Dream in abandon.” And, in these lines as much as in any in the collection, you can almost make out the wry half-smile of someone enjoying the view of something no one should be seeing, the shadowy countenance of silenced excitement typical, I imagine, of a voyeur secretly reaping his reward.

But Murphy is, again, not typical in his voyeurism—his “pornography” replaces the dark fantasies of sex with the even darker realities of marriage—anymore than he is anarchical. His desire is not for institutions to crumble, to watch interiors rot behind glossy, somehow intact facades. Rather, he desires, like someone lied to too many times, the truth only, and his pleasure (if it can be called that) derives from the simple acts of discovering and then exposing the truth at last. He peeks through the windows of suburban America and details a hidden inner life with such bleakness and cynicism as can be found there:

Passionate to secure the potential
contents of the other’s pockets,
the sex partners executing business feats

with bubbles of imitation celebrity,
skin the knees of their spoiled children
who are groomed, each to share
a slow death with a spiteful stranger.

(“Pathos Eros”)

Far from a natural occurrence, marriage is described in one poem as “filling a four-legged animal costume.” This “chimera,” Murphy continues—and chimera here is used in both senses: a patchwork monster and, more generally, an unrealizable dream—“grows corn, kids, old, but leaves / the love chain fallow” (“The Complements of the House”). And where there is marriage without love, according to Benjamin Franklin, who, despite inventing the American Dream, fathered an illegitimate child, there is love without marriage. Murphy, in another poem, corroborates:

Emerging from a motel room
and aping a seed’s creative process,
the two practitioners of giving look

for no shelter in the lives of actors
or in heat. The cold-weathered
mattress sharers improvise each
morning’s love of events while

soap operas blare from houses
that have tripped the momentum
of children pretending to be horses
that charge romance’s empty plains.

(“Natural Disasters”)

The image of the American home, a usually sunny and picket-fenced idealism, is no longer the symbol of stability that it once was. It recurs in the collection as a symbol of restriction, antithetical to the openness, the freedom, the potential of these “empty plains” of romance, walling in what is insatiable if not chaotic, what is natural. “The house,” Murphy observes, “cannot but grow as cold as law degrees” (“Chemical Waste”). This image of the American home expands into that of the American suburb where, despite its transformation into a sordid quarter of “a thousand brothels,” control—or, again, the illusion of control—is somehow upheld and perversion, in both the sexual sense and as applied to the once pure American Dream, remains, like the voyeur who embodies it, largely unseen.

For all of his cynical musings, however, Murphy keeps the book from degenerating into a series of nay-sayings from someone whose bitterness might best be described as Larkinesque. Murphy’s puckish wordplay—and Robin Goodfellow, something of a voyeur himself, does come to mind—combines with quirky, sometimes outlandish imagery to give the collection a pervasive lightheartedness: “a bolt dreamed someone else’s / career plan and a bull used office furniture / to masturbate, olé” (“Love Story”). His bottomless cache of peculiar images keeps the narrow, or focused, subject matter from becoming tiresome and redundant. There is, moreover, a kind of faux objectivity consistent in the speaker’s tone, a journalistic deadpan, which makes an outrageous image seem even more outrageous in contrast:

The genesis of women’s words
scurries from under their chairs
across the floor through the crack
in the door. Any children that may

have fallen out of them hang
stuffed on their arms at stores,
Gucci, and teeth of the flies in
their pants were fashioned from

solid testosterone.

(“The Guise”)

The poems may all be variations on a single theme, but the variations are so varied, the metaphors so unusual and, at times, rapidly fired in succession, that Voyeur is anything but predictable. And although Murphy may be the bearer of bad news—and unapologetically so: “Americans want their poetry to kiss / them on the mouth in public / and hang on them through their day / or forget it” (“Jingle on the Boardwalk”)—the news he bears is the honest-to-goodness truth, the truth as he, from his shadowy, undiscovered perch, sees it.

_______________

Alvin Malpaya is a freelance writer living in Richmond, Va., where he currently proofreads obituaries for the newspaper and scientific journal articles for the local university. He can be contacted at amalpaya@gmail.com.