A Brief History of Time (review)

When I initially saw the title of Shaindel Beers's first poetry collection, A Brief History of Time, I was leery. It sounded too epic, too glorious, and perhaps indicative of a poet with an inflated head. I feel like our—allow me to be post(post)modern and say it—"fragmented" society precludes such a sweeping, all-inclusive title. To whose history is Beers referring? To what time?

My questions were quickly put to rest by the title poem, first in the collection, which is not only impressive in its scope but accessible, funny, tender, and profound. Beers immediately proves herself to be a mistress of the Whitmanesque long line and the language of the "common [hu]man," although her poetic mission is not that simple. Merging "personal" experiences and "impersonal" terms and statistics across the page, her first poem gives us entry into the mind of a speaker who is completely immersed in her emotional, intellectual, and physical worlds and who draws meaningful and startling connections among them.

I think I'm through with being in love with peoplethough I'll love mountains as only a flatlander can. To be awedby something so big and unyielding that your desireto conquer it never dies, though you know in your heart,liver, neurons, axons, dendrites, and womb, that it willnever happen. Because the Rockies, my latest non-human love,were born 65 million years ago, maybe the same year a meteor crashednear the Yucatan, rendering the dinosaurs irrelevantexcept to squirmy kindergarteners who love themand to paleontologist Paul Sereno, who was named one of People magazine's"50 Most Beautiful People" which, unfortunately, isprobably how most people know him . . .

("A Brief History of Time")

The poems are somewhat confessional, but even more importantly, they are wholesome, and I don't mean wholesome in just the corn-fed sense, though with Beers's midwestern farm-girl background, that's part of it. "First Love," "Red Heifer," "Why Gold-digging Fails," and other early poems in the book seem channeled through the voice of—as Beers describes her in "Would you know me"—a girl

wearing the uniformof the hardworking rural poor—straight-legged jeans, plaid flannel,ponytail pulled through the backof a John Deere cap,a nondescript girl with hair as dun as after-harvest fieldseyes the color of a Midwestern sky . . .

Like the rolling plains among which many are physically set, Beers's poems are often vast, all encompassing. Long lines reach admirably to the "real" world, that is, the world beyond academia; events and situations "out there" are relevant and political, yet the characters in the poems are undoubtedly flesh and blood. We sympathize with these characters; they maintain their dignity as human beings; and we recognize the poems in which they live as catalysts for social change, all at the same time.

"'HA!'" one of my favorites, is told through the voice of a Dollar General cashier whose co-worker is battling ovarian cancer and who "wish[es] I . . . could give Ann money / . . . or find her a real job somewhere / where she doesn't have to work with junkies / and get yelled at by people who don't understand / that if the sign says '3 for 1,' you have to buy three."

Beers's startling forays into the traditions of poetic form are perhaps even more notable than her revisions of the long line. She personalizes the sestina and the villanelle in ways that echo Elizabeth Bishop—form and subject matter coexist seamlessly—but she takes her sestinas to destinations where Bishop never would have dared venture: the antiwar protest, the bedroom, and, most memorably, the strip club.

"Weekend Rain Ghazal" is a thoughtful and delightful interpretation of the ancient Persian form; Beers incorporates the custom of the poet including his or her name within the ghazal via her last couplet: "Surgery scars can make a man look like a baseball, a warrior, a map. / When I was eight, I sewed split seams of stuffed toys...