The Gleaming of the Blade
by Christian J. Collier
Bull City Press, $12.00 paperback, 37 pages
Christian J. Collier is a Southern poet, musician, and educator. In Collier’s latest chapbook The Gleaming of the Blade he establishes an intersectional experience of existing and being perceived as a Black man in the South. In conjunction with this is an inescapable essence of the past that rattles against your ribs as you read. These pieces point directly to blatant happenings of injustice as well as lingering whisps of them.
In an interview with Quintessential Listening: Poetry Online Radio Collier was asked what poetry meant to him. He responded that poetry is “using language to interrogate […] the human condition” and that it predominately explores “love, death, and desire”. This notion can be seen throughout this current chapbook. Love, death, and desire are tangled within one another in the face of the unfortunate outcomes of being a Black man in the American South. There are times when the scope of this trio seems wide, but it is still detail oriented.
The collection begins with “How It Feels to Be Black”, a biblically allusive piece which adequately sets one up for the tone and language patterns of the subsequent pieces. It also introduces the reader into a world of content The Gleaming of the Blade instantly offers. The lack of hesitation to do so displays the immediacy these poems project. The particular language of this poem connotates the dismantling or undoing of an expectation, especially if one considers how deeply the act of processing Black trauma can be tied to Christianity. The opening lines:
“Sometimes, it feels like we are loved by no God,
like there is no gospel living in the gusts of wind that combs our cheeks.
The Word doesn’t unmaim us, or leave us exempt from the wolves who always arrive blood-hungry.”
exhibit tension between what the speaker has been taught and what he has experienced in life. When reading this poem there’s a sense of rejection present. The imagery resonates with the history murdered Black bodies have with Christianity. There is a rejection from a God and a Heaven that was forced on to enslaved individuals, which is something that is still present in Southern Black communities generations later. That lingering past is making itself known through the prominent presentation of past, current, and future deaths and the desire for Black people to no longer be the victims of violence. Poems such as “When My Days Fill With Ghosts”, “Benediction for the Black and Young”, and “Quiet Storm” carry this same thread by expressing the exhausted frustration within the post death and post almost-death of close friends and family, young people, and the self, due to white anger and white prejudice. Though there is a more explicit expression of compassion and love for one’s community in the aforementioned poems. Lines from “Benediction for the Black and Young” are as follows:
“Let us bow our heads & dream
a life that loves us better. May it be gold-hued
May our minds sculpt a love supreme that also holds
our newborn ghosts. […]”
which illustrates love, death, and desire presently intertwined. The speaker yearns for an existence of peace, where life itself will be welcoming to the Black body and the Black mind protects itself via a specified care. The atmosphere feels like the conclusion to a church service with an encouraging word on the way out of the poem. There is a want for guaranteed safety expressed in the tone and the tangible images.
Almost a third of the way into The Gleaming of the Blade there’s a shift that happens in the poems. These poems feel like a close first person rather than a distanced one; the environment around the speaker is more detailed and essential to the situation. The conditions in the previous poems had an implied ‘we’ component but “When the Moon Couldn’t Be Found” and “The Standard” hold a more direct personal-core. The language turns to snapshot the scene’s physical placement. “When the Moon Couldn’t Be Found” is a more figurative leaning form of this in terms of imagery. It is about the aftermath of a tense racial situation between the Black speaker and his white presumed-partner’s father. The setting is found as the speaker drives away with John Coltrane playing from the car speakers while the speaker reflects on the prejudice he had just experienced and is still experiencing. It is the first explicit instance in which the speaker does not want to be in his body:
“[…] I was a blue locomotive rage blew from one white town to another
under a moonless sky. Coltrane was playing
& I wanted nothing but to be the rush of notes […].”
This moment displays a different version of wanting escape; it feels personal. The environment set up directly around the speaker holds remnants of hostility that caused the speaker discomfort he articulates as the father followed in a car behind him. There is a looming fear of death at hand. This idea of looming is present in “The Standard” but occurs in a way of targeting Black identity. In reference to the speaker’s name being purposefully looked over by a white coworker, the poem expresses:
“ […] Her roving tongue tears the letters apart,
reconfigures them into the notes of a song I’ve not known.
[…]
She colors me disrespectful
because I refuse to answer to a name that has never belonged to me.”
The voice of this poem is sonic and narrative in a way that encases the speaker actively disregarding his coworker in the act of respecting all a name encapsulates; an essential part of one’s identity. The hope to preserve that significance is born out of the speaker’s appreciation of where he derives from. The perception of Black identity is then flipped on its head in a set of poems that centers around the rigidity of interracial romantic relationships for the speaker.
“Candance”, “Indoctrination”, and “The Appetite” are all jarring poems to encounter, especially as a set within the chapbook. They each discuss a specific case of the speaker being in a relationship with a white woman and the presence of a promise cracking because the latter has the privilege of not acknowledging the stark differences between them. An example from “Candace” that expresses a burden the speaker carried by himself is:
“You never knew
I used to clasp my hands & pray for God to grant me a different world to wake to […].”
The perspective shifts from “we” to “I” which reveals that the subject outside of the speaker does not have to bear the same concern about her skin within the relationship. This occurs in “Indoctrination” as well. There is a distinct separation between the “you” and the “I”; the distance emerges in light of the speaker being aware of the shame white individuals wanted him to feel in the diner setting. The speaker even calls himself “the wrong-skinned man” in regard to how the patrons of the diner feel about “the white girl” and him being together. The directness in diction of these two poems, as well as “The Appetite” shows the speaker’s positionality in terms of being conscious of his identity. In the lattermost poem, the last stanza reads:
“I couldn’t imagine how it must feel to be him—wanting to be seen as ugly, slightly
monstrous, but lacking the bite, lacking the true taste for blood.”
In this piece the speaker exists in this situation with such familiarity that there is space for him imagine how the offender of his Blackness feels in their existence. Though despite that specific imagining there is a gap between the speaker and the situation that arises. That distance is caused by white privilege morphing into a sort of haunting.
The grouping and content of these three poems is engaging but on an initial read the focus on the microaggressions and outward aggression appeared almost secondary to the situation of the relationships in each piece. On the first read they weren’t fully contextualized until reaching “Chattanooga Blues”. A selection that solely focuses on the impact of growing up in a small predominately white town that doesn’t quite feel like home, It holds significant weight. It informs the four poems that come before it so much that a question arose: What would the initial reading of the poems have been if the order was slightly altered? “Chattanooga Blues” provides an amazing syntactical experience from the very first line as well as immediate clarification for what came before it. The poem begins:
“I have seen too much of this place & its people to feel truly comfortable here.
I have known the face of the darkness that lives within the city limits, stared into its eyes
& perhaps, that is why I have such a difficult time calling this home—”
and these lines carry away all doubt of circumstances through its vulnerable tone. Additionally, a conversation between the lack of bite in the white friend found in “The Appetite” and the hangings that are the focus of “A Blues for the Walnut Street Bridge” would craft a starkness that would transition back into the wider scope topics; those that explicitly discuss bereavement, wanting amity, and acting through a certain level of care and concern. Though the current structure of the collection gives transitional moments through the conversation of the speaker’s almost-home and a landmark from that location.
The penultimate poem, “Dear God”, returns to the biblically allusive and is image intense. This poem in particular is a strong addition to the closing of the chapbook. It shows the speaker active in prayer; an act that is seen as honest and willing. Yet in this moment the speaker is pleading for secure life for Black people; an attempt at hoping they continue to live. He also wishes to not have identity (in this case physical or cultural) resemblance to the perpetrators of harm. The last lines convey:
“I pleaded to remain outside of this, unmarred & blameless
not in the eyes of the Almighty, but in the eyes of those around me who claim to follow His path.”
This ending section inverts the poem in a way. There is a sense of avoiding condemnation that is attached to the speaker’s act of praying. The diction adds to this in a heart tugging way. It solidifies on this note that blamelessness equates safety and protection from violence on some level.
The Gleaming of the Blade gives a steady voice through direct visual language and prompting tone. The perspective of the Southern Black man was captured through an engaging sonic quality. Collier’s work zooms in and pans out at the right moments while keeping a relentless eye on the details. The voice of these pieces gracefully leads you down the path of painful reality and also beauty in the Black masculine perspective despite how uncomfortable you may feel. Lean into the discomfort and realize it is good.
