Place Matters

Page 23 January–February 2008 Murray continued from previous page in the thickening residue it’s leaving on the lining of her lungs. The transition from comic to tragic, from makebelieve to real, is abrupt but stark and effective. Goldbarth elegizes his mother’s life through a series of actions she preformed, many beginning with “she saved,” something neither she nor Goldbarth or even Deer can do now: “She saved: it became my college, she saved: my sister’s college…She carried the burning caraway seed of a dream inside her, like anyone.” Yet, the poem ends with Deer: but I think I’ve done what I wanted to do: they’re out of the hospital, out of the limbo of cancellation in 1942, I see them turn a corner out of sight (“Scramola this way, kiddo,” says Bruce) and they’re bringing their rollicking caper anew to the dangerous streets of America. I’ve given her a second chance. (It’s easy: she’s not “really” “alive.”) Now I turn back to my mother’s bed on July 23rd 1995. The internal rhyme of “alive” and “1995” underscores Goldbarth’s sense of futility. Yet, the poem itself is implicitly a triumph for the poet and his dying mother. In several poems, people, including Goldbarth’s mother, suggest that if anyone can make a poem of a particular situation, Goldbarth can. Many of the poems about Goldbarth’s mother are poignant attempts to live up to that expectation, the only thing left in his power to do. The section “The Rising Place of the Dough” is comprised of shorter poems. Many of them are less frantically calibrated and seem more assured than some of the longer pieces which, at times, pay too little reward for their literary dare-deviling. In “An Explanation,” after recounting the spontaneous disappearance of a woman speaking in tongues, Goldbarth throws himself across his lover when, “Once, in sleep, you started a dream soliloquy, / the grammar of which is snow on fire, the words are / neuron-scrawl, are words the elements sing to their molecules….” In “Desire Song,” Goldbarth longs for a wonderfully rich list of experiences from the past: and that ’63 Chevy we parked in, which I want, and the father who loaned it to me that night, who I want waiting up for me, walking the planet instead of being one more battery slipped inside it. After the shorter poems and a few excellent “excavated” gems from before 1983, the new poems feel very similar in timbre to many of the longer pieces from 1983–2005. Some of the briefer ones, such as “The Novel That Asks to Erase Itself” are, for their succinctness, the most energetic. Here Goldbarth discusses the difficulty of learning restraint. About Frankenstein he says, The genius wasn’t in making the monster; and certainly not in killing it; but would have been, invisibly, in not making it to begin with. For any writer whose works is so closely tethered to autobiography, there are bound to be poems included in a selected works that indicate a lack of discernment. Despite Goldbarth’s explanation of the collection’s organization (at the behest of friends), alternating between the shorter and longer poems may provide a greater appreciation for each form’s strengths. Ultimately, Goldbarth’s buoyancy and curiosity make for many richly textured, inventive poems. In “(Etymologically) ‘Work Work,’” Goldbarth ’s mother admonishes him when she learns of his divorce, “‘love, shmove. You have to work at it.’” We get the sense that Goldbarth’s mother wasn’t only talking about love, and, when it comes to poetry, Goldbarth certainly gives his all. Jessica Murray is an ESL instructor who lives and works in Boston. She also writes reviews for Birmingham Poetry Review. Detail from cover plAce mATTers eric L. Ball LandsCaPes WitH Figures: tHe nOnFiCtiOn OF PLaCe Edited and Introduced by Robert Root Bison Books http://unp.unl.edu 294 pages; paper, $21.95 Before I can discuss this collection of writing about place, I need you to fantasize with me about a possible future for literature: Imagine the eventual decline of Literature as a modern institution (inseparable from such...