a person goes dark. night shifts disappear. a lone panic capsizes the anatomically correct. men fill up on mouthwash. men float. women bite their tongues in half before they can say women and children. insomnia becomes more than the over-hyped novelization of insomnia. a boy draws a cutlass in a broom closet and is told he can’t sleep. I begin to want more from a diagnosis. a kite being flown in hell by a son gone pro.
a father shepherds his family from the storm cellar as his own father prepares to lose the orchard.
your life is a boy
looking for signs
made by women.
your mother is a vow of silence
you were born to second.
I am nobody I speak of. those alive to nuance, those seeing
a necklace in a grandmother’s clotted leg.
god is not silent. god is forgiven.
nobody wants to go to heaven…but everybody wants to die
poems, 1994-2013, David McLean
Oneiros Books, 2013
–
review by Barton Smock
–
“I snorted a line of memory today
for us, oblivion”
– from McLean’s a line
The poet David McLean strikes me as an aggressor. One whose power is to shrink himself when one is looking upward. While one yells at God, McLean whispers a speck of dust into a dog’s water bowl and waits for the silence of God. I’ve used the words in this book often, and any story my narrator leaps from may begin and end as such:
I am the wise child, undead, undead not being living’s oppositional twin. I am tasked with being the local boy David when soul has assigned to me Goliath. Or, I am the sleeping God to my soul’s restless Freddy.
But as my narrator may have been invented merely to know how he or she might suicide themselves, McLean is adept at being presently destined, as he writes in day of Laodicians (for Jack Kerouac):
“her prissy purse a coffin’s tender weight”
or in street song for Edith Sitwell:
“ , the bone
that hungers not for lithesome peace
but to feel the meat fall piecemeal
as it writhes to nothingness again; “
In these works, history means and was meant to be itself. But McLean allows it more dignity than being merely predisposed, as in it is dark now:
“ it is dark now
and history is a glorious intended
absence, meaning hiding her night
in a lucky bushel; “
I am enamored of the intended McLean employs liberally, of the work this work does to shape itself not into a path toward beauty but into perhaps a dead rabbit beneath a grotesque tree set long ago beside said path; subtitle to the ugliness we mistake for adornment when in fact it is the untouchable reflection we are unable to necklace.
As a crime scene must endure such indignities as yellow police tape, the poem must suffer inside the man aiming his bullhorn at a graffiti covered wall. It is possible David McLean is not the right man for the job. It is possible a worse world exists. It is possible this world is haunted by a failed one. Take this opening from in harbor (after ’In Harbor’, WCW):
“ the ships mutter to one another and their silent voices
are like the sea, but it is not of the sea they speak,
memory means nothing to these dreamy leviathans “
We are here now, peopled with absence. McLean knows this, and for it offers the invisible poetry of David McLean.
–
nobody wants to go to heaven…but everybody wants to die
poems, 1994-2013, David McLean
Oneiros Books, 2013
available for purchase here:
http://www.paraphiliamagazine.com/nobodywantstogotoheaven.html
A review by Barton Smock of Gillian Prew’s poetry collection Throats Full Of Graves.
book available here:
https://sites.google.com/a/lapwingpublications.com/lapwing-store/gillian-prew
THROATS FULL OF GRAVES
Gillian Prew
2013, Lapwing Press
“…like every papery human trying to remain intact
or acclimatize graciously to the summary of their scars. They say
scars are beautiful,
beautiful as moments in white dresses and combed hair
like all good brides…”
Gillian Prew, from I Have Moved Away
In her poetry collection Throats Full Of Graves Gillian Prew talks of marrying silences and fears. Prew talks of marrying. Two this, two that, throughout. She seems preoccupied with merger, and how it necessitates that one, or half of one, go missing. Brides, graves, and grief accumulate in an unveiling that announces, presently, it has always been present. Pervasive is the aesthetic of thinness. Graves become markers to make us where we’re not. Brides become representations of how names make the words they’re based on disappear.
This book moves, but is not restless. It is, what? It is steeped within. Its first two poems, respectively, begin Out of sound, / Out of winter, and those titles become the next Upon Waking then Leaving April then The Fourth Epitaph. As here, there is a care in the sequencing in the whole of the book that makes it a let breath darkly ribboning toward a white hiccup reprieve.
“…her lit loss burns in her brain
scorching the slow madness of her days”
from Essence of a Protracted Wound
For all the included seasons and dates and departures, Prew doesn’t let time and place pass without shrouding them with permanence.
“The graveyard has no heart or history a terrible now
of poor hours…”
from September 4th (someone’s wedding anniversary)
“This life
…blood-lit with history’s amplified rage.”
from The Recession of Summer
What is the imagist to do when the twin gifts of vision and vision duel for the same abyss? Prew has questions. They are billed together in her poem Cat Eyes and the Tragedy of Mother:
“Could I marry these two sharp silences?
…Are they cat eyes or a brace of griefs fresh
from the hunter’s recreation?”
Other words occur. Febrile. Imago. Prew offers the mind, and it the body. From Beyond This Skin:
“These thin breasts each a grief:
plump-robbed and plucked dead
like two starved birds.”
If union, then absence. The book, its writing, the book, its sharing. But Prew’s voice isn’t content with mere reportage. She welcomes herself into shadow and signals her location not as absence but as its stunt double.
“The past a forlorn ghost more delicate than cold;
a white flimsy paling to the poverty of a paper bowl.
Why no thrift of melancholy while chasing the worm?”
from Reading Dylan thomas While It Snows
The poems in this book are small, clear, and heavy. You won’t lose them, not even in your “bravest despair” below the “migrating bird with its entourage of woe.” They are steeped within and resumed.
sitting on a decorative toilet in her child’s front yard, the mother scrubs her left wrist with a dry toothbrush. her right wrist squeals to be cut. there’s a wet spot on the grocery bag she wears on her head and the spot spreads. her flower print dress is optimistic. with a crow ever so lightly on his mind, my father writes the address of the electric company on a notecard and slips it into a pocket bible. he tells me to forget what I’ve seen and I wonder if I get to pick. my heart feels more like a broken light bulb the more I breathe and goes to my head the less. beneath the malformed crow my father culls, he gives me the sex talk. he includes that most crows are manna from hell or holes in the kingdom.
beauty is the beginning of beauty. a man and a woman wait together for a stripper. you know the man like an intimate thought. like a toddler covered head-to-toe in blue body paint stepping in front of a blue door. the woman is an unfinished stranger whose son comes home to be with war and whose husband rests until laziness subsides. the man is aware he’s the devil and this makes him god. the woman is unaware she’s the devil and this makes it easy. the stripper is watching a horror film and it makes her want to have a child. she decorates her home then tries to remember moving a muscle. the blood you don’t see is fake.
(update: book, as such, is now only available by request…but still, was floored, then and now, to be understood in this way…)
A friend I made on writerscafe.org, Emma Hall, has kindly reviewed my self-published poetry collection, Hallelujah Lip-Synch (June 2013). More than kind, more than serious. Am grateful.
—
review by Emma Hall for Barton Smock’s self –published poetry collection Hallelujah Lip-Synch
“…language has been honed to unprecedented degrees of precision, but it exists within – and in some way acknowledges – some primal and nearly annihilative silence.” – Christian Wiman (from October 2012 issue of Poetry magazine from essay “Mastery and Mystery: Twenty-One Ways to Read a Century”)
–
The work of Barton Smock, a prolific mid-western poet, modifies the meaning of Christian Wiman’s idea in that it seeks unceasingly for the spaces between those ‘annihilative silence[s]’ that would pursue us, and for the watchful reader opens some door into human experience in a way that is at once intensely personal and detached. Through the manipulation of both common and cerebral language Smock’s poems maintain a dance between the familiar and the unspeakable. They act as a shout to the silences that curl up in experience- offering some view from the inside of that experience, but never in an expected way.
I discovered Smock’s poetry only a short time ago, but knew immediately that is was something to be passed around and carefully handled. And, though he publishes multiple volumes per year, the impact or immediacy of each collection is in no way decreased. In his latest collection, Hallelujah Lip-Synch, he picks up where he has left off in previous books exploring the relational distances from the past that linger, maybe even draw closer, as the years pull out in a line ahead of the man seeking to come to terms with history.
The themes of family, abuse, poverty, and alienation figure heavily in the book, but to call this confessional poetry seems a bit out of keeping with what is traditionally considered confessional. He speaks of mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers while also utilizing the first person, but the reader can never be exactly sure who these characters are. They are changeable, and often engaging in nearly surreal activity that might confuse more than enlighten. The key seems to be finding some language to quantify suffering, or some way of qualifying experience out of context – which at moments brings it ever more sharply into sight – as with the prose poem “no madness”. Here, with sparse, stilted language Smock illuminates what could be read as the child’s need to find his own way; sustain himself:
a dog, plainly. noses water bowl to mid-yard to the spot. exact it
will rain. rain soonly. a word the town uses. (sit) one yells from a slowly
passing go-cart. someone’s mother. I often think for.
and what is there to think but that this “dog” is left to provide for itself? Moving its own bowl to the place where it might catch that essential thing for all life- water. The phrasing of the first movement “a dog, plainly” could itself lead the reader to understand that this isn’t a dog we’re talking about at all, but a child. In keeping with the entire body of the collection, the form of the poem reveals just as much as the carefully chosen words.
A similar thread runs through the rest of the book as readers are exposed to the friction and anxiety that are inherent to life within a family. There are pieces, but they do not fit together cleanly, and the one who works to make the picture whole only becomes more bewildered with the discovery of each new piece. There would seem to be a hovering tension, or preparation running through the entire collection while blow after blow is dealt to the reader via the unsuspecting speaker, as in the poem “euphoric period” where the reader is told :
the only person I don’t recognize
is dying / in the house / is dying
from my
boredom.
There is a sense that there is some tragedy or embarrassment lurking around every corner. A reader might also come to suspect that even when we imagine things are just as they should be, or as close as they can be to right, there is something that is lying in wait; a victim or consequence of our boredom and disconnection that could not have been calculated with eyes of the present.
In Hallelujah Lip-Synch, as in previous collections, Smock has found a way to speak for those who don’t perhaps know that they have something important to say; to share. The marginalized child, the grieving mother, the ailing child or sibling- they will all find a voice here, and though it might not be the way they would voice the affliction that rests within them, they are sure to recognize their faces. Whether this is a burden or a blessing remains a judgment to be formed by the individual reader, but I find the poetry in this collection to be full of the intensity of experience in a way that I can’t help but identify and empathize. Something preserved so as not to be forgotten, and perhaps repeated.
– Emma Hall
nostalgia’s book of mug shots.
murderers mistaking boredom for regret.
the dwindling league of hesitant fathers
struggling to stay
in formation.
paroled amnesiacs
last seen
by this
photo.
sick, my son says he has an eye behind his eye. says he can see it. at night we huddle in separate corners of his mother’s bedroom and take turns pretending to be on watch. mornings we cup the mouth of our dog and shake the rocks into our palms. when my son’s health returns I will need some help throwing the rocks, but for now I can manage. the city has gotten closer but it’s a secret I’m okay with.
scary how almost nothing can happen. when I was a kid I had a neighbor boy to poke holes in and a brother to give him to.
mittens on the forepaws of a dead wolf.
one must be serious
about art
but also
flirty.
I will raise you as my own.
I will make two parts
of your mother’s
passing.
she will live in childbirth.
kingsoftrain 