True Figures: New and Selected Shorter Poems and Prose Poems 1998-2001
by David Blair
MadHat Press, $21.95 paperback, 116 pp.
Upon first reading David Blair’s forthcoming collected shorter and prose poems, I knew that I wanted to share the experience—my excitement and the rustle of energy I felt out my arms, and down my legs after the many lyric excursions—mostly throughout New England, but ranging westward and internationally to Europe and Cuba—but I struggled to find a good place to hold onto. It was difficult to describe the poems as a collective sometimes, lacking a plot or historical claim or an easily identified speaker or clever collection arrangement. This book is not an obvious project centered around a theme where poems run in cycles or speak to one-another across the bridge of shared-titles, yet I found it engaging and compelling from poem to poem, and I knew there was something in the magic of the language that could surprise me at any given instant with its wit or humor or bristling irritation or lament. Eventually, my experience became a puzzle in the nature of my own pleasure in language. So, I thought for a moment and trusted my reactions instead of turning inward too much toward self-scrutiny. Instead of asking “What kind of fool can study poetry for so long and not know why he likes what he likes?”—perhaps a fair cut—I went back into the collection.
In “Poem about the Striking Spatial Quality of Line”—ironically, set as a prose poem—the speaker pauses midway to ask “Do we stop or are we stopped by great lines?” My experience in this collection is decidedly the latter. I don’t get the opportunity to observe or gaze with admiration at the full view of the landscape of a poem in this collection so much as I pass through a poem until something commanding and electric touches me, often forcing me to reconsider my path. I routinely find myself rereading the poems, not for clarity of message or meaning, so much as to find my way back to the exquisite lyrical moments that delight and baffle me simultaneously. When one of the more conceptually-grounded poems involves the speaker glad he did not end up living as a “shoe / on Washington Street” before leaping to how “Shoes would go to Reno if they could” and imagining the shoemakers as “our malicious makers who draft / us one by one at sloped tables / behind gold leaf lettered windows / across the alley from the sweatshop”, well, the only thing the reader is left to do is to allow the poems’ imagination to unwrap its wings and then allow the reader to climb on its back for a ride.
Lyrically, linguistically, these poems travel, have “Adventures in Moving” all the while warning us to “Beware of the doddering, semi-suburban drivers / on their short legs up the turnpike. Beware of these stingy-brimmed straw fedoras. / In general, beware of drivers / who wear hats at all.” And suddenly, I am warned against the doddering, semi-suburban parts of myself in their slowness, how easily they can be made placid or sink into the shallow waters of dullness. I consider all that I’ve hidden under my hats. In many ways, these poems feel as though they serve poetry more than they serve any individual voice or speaker’s agenda, have broader goals.
Often, the poems play off traditional conventions, but wrinkle or alter them in ways that undermine the familiarity or comfort. Some of these moments include encounters with nature where the speaker both embraces the beauty of the pastoral, but doesn’t forget the human element that inhabits the space, whether it be himself or a beloved who becomes the one untainted, unpolluted part of the river. If there is a “foggy glow” after a snow, you can see a tattoo shop within it nearby, and the landscapes become populated by “Seagulls in the parking lot: a whole lot of cotton wadding.” It’s important that the human world does not automatically distract or water-down the natural settings, but they share space. We see this more than a few times where we’re taken to the beaches of the north Atlantic. In “Seven Mile Beach in October,” the imagery is spaced out while the commerce closes down at the bait shop, leaving:
scraggly tree of black-head loudmouthed gulls
all gone. A lot of loudmouths gone.
We laugh at the loudmouths, who are both the birds and many of the people among us. Yet, despite our laughter, there is never a true meanness to these poems. The characters placed here for us to encounter are streetwise and sharpened, refuse to be anybody’s fool and their charm upended me more than once, as when a mother lets the car “run out of as, gladly, to stop driving and walk” with her child. There is tenderness, but always in ways you do not anticipate.
Again and again, I experienced good fortune as many a poem demonstrated a delight in observance and encounter which made poetry suddenly feel as though it were ubiquitous, living in each detail of the world; poems like these make poetry feel more possible by taking the medium of language seriously, but not necessarily the artifact of the poem too seriously. As we might learn in “Heart of Song”: “The unspoken in every lyric might be baloney.” Nobody is bleeding within these poems, even the dying. Even in “A Week of Bombs” the poem seems to steer us away from making self-important demonstrations, instead pushing us toward reflections of what we love and would hate to lose, even if the choice is not ours to make.
One of the things I enjoyed as I read these poems was the feeling of exploration I felt as I stepped from one poem to another. While the poems themselves have the shared quality of being relatively brief (at times, Blair stretches the page while still sticking to one per piece), the moods and, even more notably, the language bounds from location to location, bursting with energy. Something these poems definitely share, even more than an affinity for the sea and mirrors (literal and figurative) are an insistence on originality throughout, capping each piece with a remarkable, memorable ending. When each poem lives on a single page, the importance of endings cannot be undervalued. We get lost in nature and “we furiously wave our hands / in front of our faces, eating the bugs / more and more like ourselves in the yard.” A nonce sonnet for former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich ends in with the would-be governor being lifted into “a light / that melts stubborn icicles, that creates a special tan, / that wedges bits of cotton between toes at the pedicurist, / that arranges old womanly hair into tinfoil chicken wings.” What an incredible light!
Even if you don’t have any inherent interest in the subject matter of these poems—admittedly, some play a little bit of inside baseball or can be obscure—and even if these pieces don’t fill out a themes bingo card and their forms sometimes break down (a sonnet is never going to rhyme here or necessarily fashion itself in fourteen lines), it’s hard to say no to the language.
It is my hope now that people can encounter and enjoy these poems and allow them to make or not make sense as needed. The freedom felt in the language comes from a voice that, even gifted with plenty to love, human and otherwise, spends a lot of quiet time in contemplation, alone. But this voice has undeniably been blessed with a rich internal life and the ability to share quiet, personal moments with language that can be both simple and mellifluous, loose, yet precise, and there is not a dull line here to be found. While I’m not going to be so bold as to say every poem will become invaluable to whomever picks up this book, I will say that every poem has at least one gorgeous moment to arrest us, to stop us in our tracks.
