Help Is on the Way by John Brehm (review)

John Brehm has mastered the art of being disagreeable without being cynical. His complaints are our complaints: it is as if we have elected him as the one most eloquent among us to register our disapproval of most of what passes for "contemporary life." If Sigmund Freud had lived into the twenty-first century his Civilization and Its Discontents might well be titled Help Is on the Way. In the whole first section of twenty-two poems (and fully half the book), Brehm is living in New York City and none too happy about it. As a newcomer his is no New Yorker-esque celebration of cultural splendors but rather a catalog of the symptoms of The City's illnesses and inconveniences. Like so many New Yorkers he spends a lot of time on the subway, and when he's not there—the "Under" of the section heading: "exhausted, dispirited, glancing over the exhausted, dispirited faces of my fellow passengers"—he's trying to "get over it."

None of us want to waste our lives caught in traffic, standing in lines for passports, being audited by the IRS, getting rerouted on public transportation, or being at the mercy of others, be they bureaucrats or madmen "hawking prophecies on the 4 Train." Brehm is our quintessential self, surrounded by strangers, indifferent or frightening, all of us pushing and shoving, trying not to get trampled, his only recourse his outrage of righteous indignation. His is a voice crying in the wilderness until, of course, he can make up his mind that he's had enough.

To a real extent Brehm's New York poems carry on in the tradition of one of our greatest city poets, David Ignatow. Ignatow's feelings for The City can be extreme ("Come, let us blow up the whole business.") and often seem more threatening than Brehm's, and yet both endear us with their humor and compassion. Brehm's "Change in Service" exhaustively details the adjustments that must be made by commuters when the uptown local service 1 Train breaks down:

For uptown local service, transferat 14th Street across the platformto the downtown number 2 Train.Take the downtown number 2 Trainto Chambers Street. At Chambers Street,transfer to shuttle bus servicefor South Street Ferry. At SouthStreet Ferry, take a Circle LineSightseeing Cruise Ship upthe East River to the 59th Street Bridge.At the 59th Street Bridge, flingyourself overboard and swim toRoosevelt Island . . .

And so on—through another dozen or more erratic and absurdist detours. But Brehm can be every bit as vengeful as Ignatow. In "Getting Where We're Going" he writes:

If I had a car in this town I'drig it up with a rear bumper horn,something to blast back at the jackasseswho honk the second the light turns green.If you could gather up all the horn honksof just one day in New York City,tie them together in a big brassy knothigh above the city and honkthem all at once it would shiverthe skyscrapers to nothingness as ifthey were made of sand . . .

While many of these City poems assail or anguish at the madness that swirls around him in a suffocating straightjacket, when the poet turns to those persons who are or ought to be emotionally close to him, he often finds more disquiet (the following poem is one long, unbroken stanza; the divisions are inserted for speaker clarity):

"I need to accept you as you are," she said,"so you need to become the kindof person I can accept . . ."

"Life Insurance," she said. "Youdon't have any Life Insurance."

"But we've only known each otherthree months. Aren't we jumping ahead?"

"Look," she said, "I don't wantto take my child and moveback to Chicago and live with my mother . . ."

I guess being an unsuccessful poetisn't as attractive as it used to be.

Getting angry or lashing out...