Mason Broadwell, Three Reviews: Svalina, Galloway, and Hunt
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Destruction Myth by Mathias Svalina
(Cleveland, OH: CSU Poetry Center, 2010)
85 pages. Paperback: $15.95
Venus and Other Losses by Lucia Galloway
(Austin, TX: Plain View Press, 2010)
90 pages. Paperback: $14.95
Fault Lines by Tim Hunt
(Omaha, NE: The Backwaters Press, 2009)
99 pages. Paperback: $16.00
[Since each poem in Mathias Svalina’s book is entitled “Creation Myth” except “Destruction Myth” (the last one), all references are to page numbers. –mb]
Mathias Svalina’s poems are similar to the films Mel Brooks made in the 80s and 90s. They’re funny, sometimes very funny, but they lack a certain emotional resonance. I don’t know if that’s a criticism or not. I love Spaceballs. Likewise, Svalina’s poems are fun to read, and the images in them swirl around you wonderfully, from Larry Bird making tiny watches (page 3) to an old man telling a group of children a story of creation, only to have his brother interrupt and point out that these children are actually mimeograph machines (page 66). Strong statement about education, or maybe about social norms, or maybe birth rates: I can’t really tell.
That’s what I found trying about this very funny and very engaging volume: I kept coming away from a poem with only half of a metaphor. I found the images chuckle-worthy and scary—“in the beginning there was nothing but unicorns” (page 61); “the fox unbent all the paperclips to form them into the skeleton of a vole, thinking it would then come to life & he could eat it” (page 50); the book the villagers read that means something different to each of them (page 46)—but then I ran into one of two problems. Either I could not determine the meaning behind the image (as in the Russian nesting dolls, page 43), or I couldn’t decide the purpose of the image within the poem. The second half of the metaphor—the part that makes a metaphor different from an image—was not there. The book image, for instance: maybe it’s a metaphor for religion, or ideologies in general, which would explain why the villagers end up locking themselves completely still with the keys that fall out of it. Then the scientists show up and I think, “Okay, it’s the reason-trumps-religion idea.” But it isn’t. They call pickpockets, who can’t help “because none of the keys opened any of the locks.” The poem breaks off here, leaving the image unresolved in both the literary and the photographic senses. The images just aren’t rooted in as much propositional content as they could be.
I don’t mean to nitpick. The lines are extremely clever and exciting. It’s just that after 9 or 10 poems all entitled “Creation Myth” that more or less explore the same subject (though each in a different way) I was looking for something different. I wanted variation of purpose. I’m in favor of novella-length poetry projects like this, but I would like a little breadth in the scope of the project. And I think that’s where this book falls short. It tries to explore one idea 44 different times, but not really in 44 different ways. At best, it contains 44 different images of the same idea. “Creation myths” is too singular an idea to occupy an entire book of poetry if you only operate in images and metaphors, and Svalina seems to be wrestling with this uniformity in a less-than-fruitful way. It’s like Spaceballs making “schwartz” jokes every 10 minutes: it’s only funny the first 18 times or so.
I love a swirl of wild words. I love chaos in a poem. I love metaphors that grab you by the eyelashes and pull you through the poem until, with a flick of the wrist, they leave you stranded in your own reflections without a ticket back to reality. Mathias Svalina’s poems do that individually. I will keep this book to remind myself how haunting and absurd an image can be. I just prefer a book of poems to be more than a collection of images, as this one (and particularly its final poem “Destruction Myth”) sometimes seems to be. Nevertheless, a must-have for collectors of undomesticated ideas and dreams. Also for fans of Larry Bird.
I’ll admit it. The first thing I thought of when I saw the title of Lucia Galloway’s book Venus and Other Losses was that Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch where the famous sculptures vote to stage a walk-out of the museums. The vote passes unanimously, with one abstention: the Venus de Milo, who of course has no arms.
Terry Gilliam’s unique style of animation turned out to be a good prologue to Galloway’s book. The images are varied and stylized, with heavy reference to literature, art, and current events. What I like about the poems, however, is that the references to current events are not pulled from the evening’s headlines on CNN. They’re pulled instead from page 4 of the local section of the paper, as in the poem “Ginseng on Court Street,” which is about a woman who owned a local coffee shop in New York. Galloway’s poems have a personableness that other poets often cast by the wayside as they attempt to be witty or (ugh!) “current.” Reading these poems, I feel as if she is talking to me about arms and coffee and her tree specialist. It’s a very comfortable read.
I don’t mean to say that the book is without force. Galloway has a predilection for persona poems, ranging from Lidian Emerson to Jane Carlyle to a 9th-century Japanese noblewoman. Some of these are quite striking. My favorite poem in the book is “We Are Occasional Like That,” which takes its title from these lines:
We are occasional like that. Like those times as lovers when
we chance to close the distance separating every living being
from the object of its love. The moment when each gives way
to both… [original italics]
But this isn’t the kind of force that mugs you in the subway. It’s the kind of force that hypnotizes you and makes you confess to secretly loving High School Musical 2 in front of your father.
This book also reads as if it was written by a librarian (Galloway is co-chair of the Claremont, CA Library), in that most of her poems have reference to literature, art, history—one of the humanities. Occasionally I had to stop reading and look up a person or event that a poem references. Some readers will find such research boring or disruptive. The poem, they will say, ought to pull me into its world and exist and mean without my having to do research. That is probably a fair criticism of poems like Galloway’s, but if Prime Time poetry does anything, it establishes and strengthens connections to a world outside of itself, even if that world is 9th-century Japan, as in Galloway’s poem “Bending Water,” a persona poem which, like the stream it describes, trickles peacefully through its subject matter while also, in the quiet manner of a reference librarian, directing you to the encyclopedia to research Japanese social customs of the 9th century. It’s actually a fascinating subject, and I am indebted to Galloway for pointing me in that direction.
The main complaint I have about this book is that it never blows a trumpet with its butthole like in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The poems rarely surprised me. They rarely made me question my assumptions or reflect on the “usual” interpretations of an idea. The poem “We Are Occasional Like That” was surprising, and that’s one reason why I liked it so much. And the title poem, with its fascination with arms and loss, and its frenzy (compared to the other poems) of related images and subsequent cross-construction of those images, did that as well, but by and large this book simply and quietly moves from one subject to the next with dignity, poise, and grace. And that is no bad thing. Not everyone will like it, but then not everyone likes Monty Python.
In summary, a reflective, kettle-on-the-boil kind of book with a few surprises, but surprises that aren’t anything to make you saw your own arm off.
Do you remember the narrator in The Big Lebowski? Played by Sam Elliott, I think, with the cowboy hat and huge mustache and looking very out of place in the bowling alley where the Dude hangs out. But it works. That’s Tim Hunt’s first book, Fault Lines. It is a soulful, insightful book of verses that relates stories from the past and present in reflective, surprising ways, always begging us to look beyond the poem into the truth it attempts to capture. “…this is not / a poem,” he says in “Home Again.”
It is the only voice I have
trying to say
those moments and this one
and the miles give me no room to play.
Hunt’s voice is considerably older and more mature than I am used to reading in a first book, which I would like to imagine betokens generations of wisdom passed down by word of mouth in the hills of northern California and finally transcribed by this, their prophet. I had to read these poems slowly: often they are heavier on atmosphere and tone than on detail, as in “The Web;” sometimes they are heavy on detail too, as in “Peet’s,” though they never lose that wonderful ruminating voice. For a younger generation looking for wildness and edge and whatever still survives of postmodern irony (let it go, ya’ll), this book may not be very appealing. This book may not be for everyone, but it is for those who have a past and believe that past is worth remembering. It is for those with functional families that annoy them. It is for those with dysfunctional families they love like crazy. It is for those who have lived long lives of nights and days. It is for those who want to learn how to look back and not regret everything—only some things. It is for those with the kind of family stories that won’t shut up. It is for those to whom landscape is an extension of the soul.
So we may be aiming at an older audience with this book. Hunt often speaks as if he is a grandfather recalling life before [insert currently-malfunctioning modern convenience]. He also often speaks about his grandfather—and his father, mother, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. Family is an important element in these poems, to the point that many of Hunt’s relatives are mentioned by name as he tells their stories. And place is important, too. I count 22 of the book’s 56 poems that contain a town, state, or other map-able location in the title. Family and place. Those two ideas run through his book like the thread that forms the central image of the book’s final poem “Postscript (Threads),” which begins:
Take a thread of cotton,
of creek or of blood,
it doesn’t matter. We are
like children
threading a needle
to stitch carefully
through the very
tips of our fingers…
I like that, and I like those themes. But I have a hard time coming up with a list of colleagues my age who would be as thrilled as I am about a book that does not contain, for instance, an overt description of sex.
At the same time, Hunt establishes himself as a very contemporary poet, whatever the crap that means. (I think it has something to do with ego and asymmetrical haircuts.) “Peet’s” plays with time and the reliability of the narrator in a very reflexive way, producing an engaging meditation on relationships, loss, and the nature of poetry:
I don’t know who you are
as I write pretending I do.
But if you were you and we were sitting in Peet’s,
each detail would draw another.
Tim Hunt is a new voice, maybe, but he is an old voice. His is the voice I imagine the landscape would assume if it wished to tell us the history of the west (and the east and north and south)—a history of farmers, housewives, boys in overalls and little else, girls in hand-me-down gingham before it was a cliché, of hills and wheat and Model A Fords and mules. If the main components of landscape are people, places, and stories, then Tim Hunt is a landscape poet. And as Sam Elliott says simply in The Big Lebowski, “I like your style, Dude.”
Bio
Mason Broadwell is pursuing an MA in Rhetoric and Composition at Western Kentucky University, and teaching composition. He won the 2010 Browning Literary Club Award.