Eyes Bottle Dark Witha Mouthful of Flowers Review
If, as Seamus Heaney believed, i chief role of poetry is to write place into existence, another of its engines is the impulse to conjure an extant, if fickle and imperceptible, cocky — a cosmos or construct, depending on your point of view, of gender, demographics, sexuality, environs, and the exigencies, abilities, and of the desires of one's censor, one's body, one's identity.
Cute, daring new books by Jake Skeets and Matthew Zapruder, take upward, in striking means, the question Gregory Orr poses in his verse form "Who'd Desire to Be a Homo?," published in his 1995 collection City of Salt, long earlier toxic masculinity became a buzz phrase:
Who'd Want to Be a Human?
With his eye
a blackness sack
in which a small
animal'due south trapped.
With his grief
like a knot
tied at birth,
balled upward and hard.
With his rage
that smashes the ten
thousand things
without blinking.
With his mind
like a tree on a cliff —
its roots, fists
clutching stone.
With his longing
that's a dry well
and where is the rain?
The question for Skeets and Zapruder is not then much who would want to exist a man, or whether or not "traditional" notions of masculinity are toxic, binary, or otherwise, merely rather how does one be or become a person who is besides a man — a lover, a brother, a nephew, a cousin, a husband, a survivor, a father, a son, a citizen, a human — in a world that can obstruct or confuse that becoming.
Skeets, in his countdown National Poesy Series-winning collection, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, ranges the fields, railroad train tracks, backseats, coal yards, and watering holes of liminal border towns attuned to the particular roil of the Native American boys and immature men who wander in and through them. He attends with exquisite, lyric eroticism to the ways in which their world is shaped by landscape, violence, danger, prejudice, intoxication, Diné language and civilization, sexual tension, and the hauntings of a host of familial and tribal ghosts. Soma, discussion, and world turn into one another everywhere ("I open up the word and crawl inside its spine, barbed wire, turbine / with dark belly, coil hierarchy. // What word, you ask. Your trunk a cloud flattened in my hand" from "Beloved Poem").
Male parent'due south Day, Zapruder's fifth verse collection, moves with audacity and vulnerability into the territory of "fatherhood" — across familial generations but also in terms of nationhood, peculiarly in the shameocracy of our current purgatorial Trumpian slough of despond, during which fourth dimension — Zapruder tells us in a prose Afterword to the book — near of the poems in this collection were written. With characteristic wry sense of humor and forthrightness ("is at that place anyone worse / than Roseanne Barr?" he asks in one poem), Zapruder makes brave forays into his ain complex experiences and emotions as the father of an autistic son while at the aforementioned time against the vexed promises, inheritances, and failures of America'south Founding Fathers and its citizenry.
*
It was 106 degrees in August 1985 when I moved with my husband to an united nations-air conditioned rental house in Denton, Texas, so that he could enter a graduate jazz program at the Academy of North Texas. Nosotros'd arrived from the east coast (except for a trip to St. Louis to see my youngest sister graduate, I'd not ventured west of the Mississippi in all of my then 29 years). One of our first outings was to view Richard Avedon's show In the American West that had opened that fall at the (air-conditioned) Amon Carter Museum in nearby Fort Worth. I constitute the exhibit stunning, disturbing, haunting. It unnerved me that Avedon —himself an Easterner on unfamiliar turf, and best known for his fashion and celebrity photographs — would choose to photograph, over a menstruum of several summers — a wild mix of wanderers, snake handlers, drifters, policemen, carnies, workers of all kinds — all in front of a large backdrop of white paper that removed any context and intensely highlighted the bodies and faces of his subjects. How weirdly lyric, I remember jotting in my notebook, this try to remove the kind of "story" that landscape or other surroundings might provide his subjects. Against their seamless, blank backdrops, each person portrayed evinced a terrible isolation.
In the 30-plus years since I saw that show, certain images from it — faces, by and large — take stayed with me, in the way that some of Diane Arbus, Walker Evans, and Carrie Mae Weems's photographs have become part of my psychic mural. A calendar month agone, when an advance review copy of Jake Skeets's book slipped into my hands from an envelope sent by Milkweed Editions, I constitute staring dorsum at me, on the book'south encompass, one of the very particular images I've carried with me from the Avedon showroom and the catalogue that accompanied it: a portrait of a man/boy, a Native American, his brownness implied and intensified in the black-and-white photograph by the white drop-material, his beat buttons and fingernails luminous, fists clenched. This was a person, I wrote at the fourth dimension in my notebook, both indelible and disappearing.
As I would very soon acquire, this person ("Benson James, Drifter, Road 66, Gallup, New Mexico, 06/30/79," a subject murdered, I would also observe, with a year) was in fact Jake Skeets's uncle, the photo taken earlier Skeets was born. It strikes me that Skeets'due south book is in many means a writing into and around the space that Avedon's photographic praxis for that project obliterated — acknowledging the isolation, yes, but also conjuring the tribal, familial, and geographical forces that shaped Benson, that shape whatsoever person in liminal or marginalized circumstances. (Skeets has written and spoken about his experiences with this photograph in many places, including here (https://milkweed.org/blog/drifting-a-comprehend-epitome-story) and hither
https://lithub.com/on-the-famous-photograph-of-my-late-uncle-that-inspired-a-collection/ ).
Skeets'southward book is full of fields, not the least of which is the folio itself:
dogs
maul
remains
like white
space
does
("In the Fields")
Skeets non then much populates each page with words simply rather calls along or invokes out of the field of each page what might not otherwise be seen or noticed: two boys exploring each other's bodies under a blanket of stars, overgrown train tracks, "a tractor tire bankroll over a man'southward skull," broken bottles, and a galaxy of flora and fauna — owl pellets, corn beetles, bottle caps, lupine, beardtongue, pigweed, Mormon tea crowns, sego lily, burnt matches, coal slurry, blue flax, buffalo blur. Boys and immature men — drifters, drunks, lovers — are the citizenry of these fields, and in their violence and in their erotic desires they are inseparable from the landscape and the words that in part create that landscape (and vice versa), as in this terminal section of "Tácheeh" (Diné for a ritual ceremonial sweat order) :
fingers lupine
beardtongue
bee establish to harrow grasses
pronghorn in wild rose
truck radio more sego lily
and pigweed spewing
from open up mouth
boys watch ricegrass shimmer in smoke
fires everywhere circular them
arms stretch in sap and bark
hair now meadow
limbs tangle into snakeweed
burning called-for called-for burning
they know becoming a man
means knowing how to become charcoal
staccato of ash
holding a match to their skin
trying non to lite themselves on fire
The incendiary ritual here depicted holds the float of communal, cultural, every bit well as sexual initiation. The boys are the field, the field the boys. It is a authentication of all of Skeets'due south poems, in fact, that the risks, terrors, and beauty of the land, of sexuality, of criminality, of language itself are inextricable, inseparable. A poem for a cousin, "My Brother," again shows this rich panoply of pantheistic forces by which manhood, personhood, can be shaped or shut downwards:
You kissed a man the fashion I practise
but with a handgun. You called it; I'g the fag
we were afraid to know, the i we'd throw rocks at, huff at similar horses.
I learned to impact a man by touching myself. I learned to be a man by loving one.
Prison house is non the chicken wire we'd become tangled in. Remember our bloodied
knees and bloody palms from mangled handlebars, beer bottles,
and cactus spines? Recall the horned toad
we didn't mean to impale?
Our silence — thick every bit the dusk kicked up past our skinny legs. Y'all are still
that silence. Still that boy holding a deflated torso
with your dawning hands.
In even so another poem, "Naked," Skeets writes, "the closest men go [to being naked] is when they are covered in blood / or nothing at all." And it is perhaps this wish to be naked, transparent, known, shown, revealed as truthful that is the simmering, about-to-blow combustion engine of these poems of becoming. Joining the most powerful male poets of Eros of our moment — Carl Phillips, Cyrus Cassells, Forrest Gander, Michael McGriff, Brian Teare — Skeets brings his considerable gifts non only to the particular terrible beauty of his native Navaho turf, but to a world in which nosotros must all "unlearn how to hold a fist."
*
If the "field" is the presiding formal trope in Skeets's book, a meta-awareness of "the poem" itself suffuses Matthew Zapruder's Male parent's Day. Of the volume'due south 52 poems, nearly half comprise in their titles the give-and-take "verse form" or "poesy" (usually as "verse form for," every bit in "Verse form for Doom" or "Poem for Coleridge") or "song" ("Some other Song," "A Dear Song," for example). This forthright confrontation of the manner, process, possibilities, and limitations of his chosen form of communication is typical of Zapruder, whose book Why Poesy? is a attestation to this author'due south faith in the privilege, limitations, and responsibilities of the poem, especially in troubled and troubling times.
Parenthood has its superstitions, its "offspring-protective" rituals and behaviors. In many cultures, for example, parents ward off the evil eye past circling their babies with salt or spitting on them if they're complimented for their beauty. In other places, babies are dropped from rooftops into waiting blankets or squeezed until they cry to inspire force and courage. For Zapruder, the poem itself becomes a talismanic site for expressing his personal and political worry, ire, guilt, love, and conscience, all italicized by his being a father, and in detail the male parent of an autistic son. In their odal appeals — to abstractions similar doom, vow, and harm, or to detail poets (among them Tomaž Šalamun, James Tate, and Paul Éluard) — the poems frequently serve as totemic "anthems" from a male parent concerned about his son (and other people's children) born into hard times and under straining circumstances. The poems either face up bad "fathers" [Paul Ryan, Justice Kennedy ("pious grandstanding / from the night collective grief / of half of us"), Donald Trump] or evoke those in whose poetic vision he tin can believe, his poesy "fathers" ("we were each built-in / the shadow of reality upon the states // and then be non easily angry," for example, from "Poem for Merwin").
In "Dec," a poem that narrates a family'southward participation in a peaceful protest in the wake of Trump'south election.
. . . I lifted my son
then he could see
what people
expect like
when they hear
the song Imagine
. . .
everyone understands
in a different
contradictory fashion
the so far purely
abstract
catastrophe
so many millions
of choices
brought united states,
non as well far
from the water
I saturday on the couch
below the sound
of blades
drinking amber
numbing fluids
my thoughts
chopping the air
feeling not
what is the word
to be father
equipped . . .
"My Life" recounts the birth of the narrator's son, its joy, its complexities:
sorrow months
then slow realizing
playground dread,
the year
of diagnosis when
our life kept
beingness a place
for worsening fears
in enviable comfort
to occur every bit nosotros
graciously received
the humiliation
of existence the ones
gratefully non to exist,
those many hours
in the chamber screaming
and then lurching out
for exhausted walks,
trying with no
success to protect
us from everything
anyone could say . . .
This poem and the others in Male parent'south Day provide a mode for Zapruder's father-speaker to "equip" himself. After in "My Life," the speaker writes of his son's peachy pleasure in song, itself a redemptive gift:
now nosotros're moving
fortunate ones
from our beloved house
to another loma
near a school
where his mind
happily alive
in music tin abound,
can I say he is
my painful joy,
he thinks in rhyme,
the truest friend
to no one yet
he is my
favorite give-and-take
remembrancer . . .
Zapruder is ever mindful that even despair is a privilege, and his poems offer a bellwether blaring call to the advantaged to exist mindful of the plight of others. In the title poem, "Father'south Day." he writes,
we don't deserve
a little brunch
followed by
a sleepy blow task
nosotros all know
merely to survive
this totally
survivable life
is not enough
what skilful will it exercise
we must not think
this is some dream
the children sleeping
alone in some
detention middle
don't need
our brilliant sincerity
it's not enough
to give some money
make some calls
they are not ours
but they are
we are the get-go
new fathers
ours failed
where we cannot
stop waiting
there are no others
In their unique ways, these two poets — Skeets in his intense, compressed, and oblivion-haunted somascapes and Zapruder in enjambed, expansive, and seemingly tangential jeremiads and love songs — offer insightful delvings into the manifold lives of boys and men. Both books acknowledge, equally Zapruder puts information technology in "Tunnel Park," the last poem in Father'south Day, that "everyone knows / worse times // are coming / who isn't afraid / only the dead," withal each believes in the redemptive forces of linguistic communication, of honey made through language, as cliche as that may sound. Zapruder is ruthless in his willingness to face up down hard wrongs (in addition to politicians, colleagues at a staff meeting, he even takes on the iconic Walt Whitman for his racist views), simply his "Poem for Vows" is one of the most honest and cute epithalamiums I've ever read. And Skeets'due south incantatory "In the Fields" is a calling back into the fold of the present all who have been turned by its injustices and bigotry to ash:
We are all cute at least once.
Mud water puddles along enamel.
Eyeteeth blossom into osprey. Our bones
dampen like snowmelt nether squirrel grass.
Nosotros could be boys together finally
as milk etch, tumbleweed, and sticker bush.
We can be beautiful once again beneath
the sumac, yarrow, and bitter water.
[Eyes Canteen Night With a Mouthful of Flowers, published by Milkweed Editions on September 10, 2019, 96 pages, $sixteen.00 paperback. Father'south Twenty-four hour period, published by Copper Canyon Press on September 3, 2019, 96 pages, $17.00 paperback]
Source: http://www.ronslate.com/whod-want-to-be-a-man-on-eyes-bottle-dark-with-a-mouthful-of-flowers-by-jake-skeets-fathers-day-by-matthew-zapruder/
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