Little Armageddon by Gregory Fraser (review)

Of Greg Fraser's third collection, Designed for Flight, published in 2014, poet Richard Howard wrote, "What astonishes the reader is that the poems are not confident or even hopeful, but correct, obviously true." Now, with his most recent book, Little Armageddon, Fraser continues his clear-eyed gazing into the tiny and tremendous abysses of modern American life. This collection is a significant achievement that portrays the poetic speaker's experience of the comedy and the burden of midlife, sandwiched between generations. What makes Little Armageddon singular is Fraser's mastery of poetic form and his incorporation of both complex thought and nuanced feeling into his poetic meditations.

The contemporary poetry scene (largely centered in academia) has a horror of sentimentality. This aversion has resulted in the small-press publication of many poems that are lyrical or intellectual at the expense of feeling. On the other hand, popular and spoken-word poetry have filled the resulting cultural hole with a churning mass of emotional melodrama for more mainstream readers. Fraser's collection transcends the incompleteness of both literary scenes. The truthfulness of the poems is achieved by the employment of a consistent, present-day speaker who ranges over past and present experiences with authority and compassion. Other than the rare venture into a dramatic persona in the first part of the book, Fraser's voice is that of a father in middle age who empathizes both with his children's innocence and with the weary wisdom of his parents and in-laws.

The first section (there are three) could quite fairly be described as "vast." The poems in this part range from poems of mystical (if comic) vision, like "Lucky Gnarl," to poems touching upon how one should live ("My Idea of Heaven") and self-judgment ("Little Armageddon"), to the ominous voicing of a conquering people's drive to dominate the weak in "Like Angels." The opening poem, "Business," is a study in the interweaving and balancing of opposite concepts to achieve an enlarged view of a man's life in the city, when this man not only works but also thinks:

A man hands me his business card, and asks for mine.How should I know my business? The worldis my business, and the world is none of my business.

In the hands of a lesser writer, this play on words might constitute the entire message of the poem, and be teased out and elaborated ad nauseam. Fraser's speaker, though, surges on to pile oppositions on top of this first one, questioning his own personal responsibility to take up a profession, in the fullest sense. And by the end of the poem, he does. The most formally fascinating poem here, "Nothing but a Few Bare Trees," employs both internal rhymes and end rhymes in an organic, nontraditional form to hypnotize the reader into seeing as the residents of the city neighborhood see:

        across acres of ice,something about their fixtureunder a hard white sky, caught

and held the eye. Still, they werenothing but a few bare trees—nothing,nonetheless, a few of us at first, then more

whose houses lined the south end'ssmoother shore, came to take for masts.

As this first part of the book ends with an almost Yeatsian vision of a manger crèche, a forlorn, pregnant figure appears, in a foreshadowing of the explosion of childhood in the second section.

This next part of Fraser's collection features a speaker brought down from his intellectual and spiritual heights by the demands of fatherhood. The changing diction and mood of the first poem, "Hide and Seek," emphasize his inner fall:

My kids humped under the bedspread lookLike a meal inside a python. SometimesI wish my kids werea meal inside a python. Fatherhood, I sometimes think,is a python that swallowed me whole. Then I remember my wifeis the python.

The lumpy, misshapen lines here evoke hard-to-digest...