Fallen from a Chariot (review)

Deep into a sequence of poems that links the waning of ancient empires with our own troubled time, Kevin Prufer paints an arresting portrait of this particular historical moment:

The rains were many and our days were few. People kept leaping out of windows.

The air was full of businessmen, Their red ties streaming behind their necks.

Dear Editor, I wrote, before I deleted the words. Dear Editor, We’ve failed in too many ways . . .

(“The Empire Was Falling”)

Part apocalyptic prayer, part elegy, Fallen from a Chariot—the award-winning poet’s fourth collection—is a lyrical and metaphysical exploration of intersections and collisions between worlds: the contemporary and the historical, the natural and man-made. As Prufer’s poems repeatedly dramatize, the perils of contemporary life are many: cars slide off bridges, planes fall from the skies, the homeless freeze to death in abandoned doorways. “Some things are too sad to be made beautiful,” Prufer observes, watching an ambulance pull away as its wheels make “fading tracks in the snow” (“An Ambulance”). “How to sing it,” then, becomes the poet’s driving question. Prufer’s collection offers no single answer, but his lyric interrogations of history, culture, and the natural world form a powerful reflection on the possibilities of poetic inquiry at the start of a new century.

Although he is not a strictly religious poet, Prufer is a deeply spiritual one. Throughout the collection, the absence and erasure at the heart of secular life are paramount concerns. Witnessing a car crash, for instance, the poet reflects on the bystanders’ unspoken thoughts. To be spared sudden death is, of course, its own salvation, and the survivors take comfort as they can in prosaic rationalizations rather than transcendent belief. “Good,” the poet writes, “to believe that the body is, after all, merely / a machine that has stopped // and will not work again.” The mechanistic model of humanity, Prufer suggests, is a reflection of a particularly American technological obsession which comes at dire psychic cost.

Prufer employs surrealism as he draws on the conventions of the pastoral to examine the problematic nature of belief in a fallen world. An angel’s crash into a suburban neighborhood sets dogs to barking and awakens children, who “stroked / the wings // until sparks glowed beneath their hands” (“An Angel”). The adult residents, troubled by this quasi-divine interloper’s inexplicable entry into their lives, “built a ring of stones around him” then “touched each feather // with gas and flame / until they glowed and shook, one hundred / little index fingers”: their ordinary lives disrupted, the suburbanites restore order through a ritual better suited to some ancient of Biblical culture. Through lyric deliberation, the poet underscores the limitations of empirical knowledge: “Sometimes, I think I understand death,” the poet writes, “my mother whose heart just / stopped while she spoke to a friend on the phone. Painless, painless, // I say then. And merciful, the receiver dangling from its cord” (“A Car Has Fallen from a Bridge”).

Prufer’s attention to the mechanics of death emerge from a deeply impassioned inquiry. In “Dissected Bird,” the speaker is reluctant witness to a delicate anatomical operation: “Tweeze seeds from the stomach, if you must. // Each wing reveals a socket, hollow as a skull. Scrape them clean of chaff.” But the poet’s gaze tends from the visible wreckage of the bird toward what cannot be seen, shifting the ground of discourse to the ontological: “A breath came from it once, invisibly and quick. // A beat and a call.” For the poet, classification of body is inseparable from spirit: “There is a song for the liver,” Prufer writes, “and the one for the spleen. A tune for every thing. // A rustling of wings where the soul once lived, a scratching as if wanting // out and into the sky . . .” Of the no-longer animate, the poet makes song: “wings like dead leaves,” are transformed into “a feather to write your name.”

Prufer’s work shares the post-Romantic philosophical bent of Larry Levis and Jorie Graham. Like...