Joshua Johnston Reviews Figures of an Apocalypse by Edward Mullany
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Figures for an Apocalypse
Edward Mullany
Publishing Genius Press
December 17, 2013
198 Pages
ISBN 13: 978-0-9887503-4-0
$12.99
“I’ll tell you a story,” says a mother to her son in “The Cup of Tears,” the poem opening the second section of Edward Mullany’s haunting new collection, Figures for an Apocalypse. “Once there was a road that led to a city that wasn’t burned.” Once, as the unshakable sense of loss permeating the collection would lead us to believe, but no longer.
With titles such as “The Water That Tasted Like Blood,” “The Room Full of Amputated Limbs,” and “The Boy Who Was Drawn and Quartered,” Mullany’s poems risk appearing, at a casual glance, grotesque or sensationalistic. However, the work itself proves surprisingly subtle, improbably juxtaposing the darkness of Lautréamont with a formal economy and keen eye for imagery reminiscent of Basho.
A poem bearing the title “The Girl Whose Eyes Were Sewn Shut,” for instance, reads in its entirety, “There was a chair in the center of the room. On this / she sat.” Another, “The Dead Dog,” simply states, “A girl walked / down the street, / carrying it.” The majority of Mullany’s short poems function in this manner, meditating on the pregnant silences that bookend apocalyptic events rather than confronting the violence of the events themselves. The uneasy atmosphere cultivated by such a technique is thought-provoking and emotionally-distressing in equal measure.
The collection also features a number of narrative prose poems, most of which see Mullany utilizing a detached and detail-oriented perspective to render the mundane alien. One such poem, “The Man Who Beat His Dog,” begins, “He worked near the top floor of one of the city’s many office buildings, which meant that every weekday morning, or most weekday mornings – for some days were holidays, or days he called in sick – he was obliged to move vertically through space to a height at which humans didn’t ordinarily exist.” These poems work much like Mullany’s minimal verses, eschewing tight conclusions in favor of an often unsettling sense of mystery.
Figures for an Apocalypse, like all good collections, is rich with contrast and contradiction. While the sparseness of poems such as “The Man in the Coffin” and “The Wooden Boy” create a definite sense of timelessness, a poem like “The New Crucifixions,” in which “People recorded them on mobile devices and posted footage of them online,” unabashedly engages contemporary culture. Poems such as “The Ghosts of Men Who Died Without Confessing Their Sins” and “The Day Painkillers Fell From the Sky” revel in the limitless possibility of the fantastical, while others like “The Minnesota Divorce” and “A Rugged Coast” remain grounded in seemingly mundane human interaction. In poems such as “The Men Who Jumped to Their Deaths,” wonder is conjured just as often as horror, and beneath the elegiac tone often established by the collection’s grim subject matter, an off-kilter humor persists.
At every turn, Mullany’s poems are brimming with death, described in such a detached manner that it is tempting to walk away from the collection convinced of life’s insignificance. Yet, the precision and evenhandedness with which he treats each detail in these tight, economic poems could just as easily be read as an argument for the significance of all things. Ultimately, the collection manages to achieve a level of emotional complexity in which both sentiments somehow ring true, creating a harmony both terrible and sublime.
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Joshua Johnston's poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in such publications as Spork, Shampoo, Pretty Owl, and Aggro Rag. He lives in Caneyville, KY, where he runs Tent Revivalist Tapes with his partner, Kaylin.