by Daisy Fried
U. of Pittsburgh Press 2006
Reviewed by David Sewell
So What?
There’s no doubt that Daisy Fried’s second book, My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again, will be warmly received by the seven people in America who still read poetry these days (disclosure: I’m not one of them). And—to prove that this review isn’t being dictated straight from my subconscious to a clairvoyant Mayan child-cum-secretary née cast-off from Mel Gibson’s upcoming romantic comedy Apocalypto—the book was, in fact, a finalist for the 2005 James Laughlin Award, which, apparently, is some sort of scheme the not-completely sozzled contingent at the Academy of American Poets cooked up to snooker authors with two books in the sack into accepting a lock of the late publisher’s well-connected hair. I realize, then, that, by writing the following review, I’m risking damnation, or at least less brandy in my sidecar at the next Academy mixer. Yet, a decent swimmer me, I’ll continue.
Fried has a talent for writing highly readable lyrical poetry that, in the words of fictitious movie drunk Arthur Bach, doesn’t suck. Fine. But what about the tops of those seven heads filled with poetry (see above)? Might we inquire how they’ll fare? Well, they’re safe, I’d say. Neither form nor content is being pushed very far in this book. Likely, a pleasant afternoon will be passed in the company of these poems, but few lives will be changed or bothered much by them.
Fried, with a refreshing lack of concern for the dryness of her simple shoes, does wade often into the ebb tide of childhood and adolescence. From there, she reports on and inhabits the types of characters that, according to Fried, dwell in that realm. Too often, though, there’s not much new to be uncovered, unless you think a by-the-numbers description of an adolescent boy (which is the whole of the poem “First Boyfriend, 14”) is uncharted territory. (Okay, she does compare him to a minotaur; but too little, too late.)
Fried bravely pays much effort to making her scenes vivid. She seems to prefer the eye of the painter or filmmaker—we see the concern for lighting à la, say, Edward Hopper, “Sunlight gaps into the room” (“Go to Your Room”), as well as concern for the most niggling details: “Her eyelash brush has left / its own celestial smudge over one brow” (“Broken Radios”) or “oldtimey accordion music / on the back-wall jukebox, its sliding lights, / heatless not-hearth blinking against sapped / north latitude winter window sun” and “The man / in dirty suede” (The Drunkard’s Bar”). The idea must be that all these details amount to something—some reflection of life today, its obsessions and devotions, its predilections and variations, to help us make sense of how her characters and personalities fit into and navigate such a world, and, therefore, to gain a better, at least different, understanding of these our modern times for ourselves. But, too often, there’s the feeling that these details are irrelevant or not much more than ballast.
Admittedly, most of the poems feature fairly well sketched-out scenes (as the above quotations indicate) in which fairly well sketched-out characters talk and act and interact. That said, the poems, while mostly well executed, seem a bit too easy-listening, at least for me, my expectations, and my fourteen dollars.
Her attempts at political poems are a different story—at best, they’re regrettable. “The Hawk,” a response to the renewal of the Patriot Act, did not have to be written, and its inclusion is the closest the book ever came to causing me any sort of consternation. The poem doesn’t quite achieve what the idea seems to require, and it wasn’t a very strong idea to begin with. (Take a guess what/who the hawk stands for; a dove appears later in the book, multiplying into nine or ten doves—all of which is, I think, a little heavy-handed, obvious, and lacking in artfulness.)
The “Hawk” poem is both inaccurate (why, for instance, call the hawk’s squirrelly meal “plunder”?) and, in a strange twist, unfairly hard on males: the poem features a male tourist who “grabs” at his wife’s “wrist knobs” and “gabbles a strange language, transfixed”; a little boy who is willing to break his mother’s fingers (which are trying to lead him away) to see the bird eat its meal (the bird has alighted on a monkey bars of all places—get it?); and a man—an ex-hunter, whatever that is—who practically salivates at the scene. Weird.
The other overtly political poem, “American Brass,” takes too long to dramatize that the speaker has conflicted feelings about being an American in a foreign country. This speaker is in France, watching an American high school marching band at the same time that the bombing of Afghanistan is beginning (a fact that’s reinforced by the spineless inclusion of the relevant dates [one just pre- and one just post-9/11] at the end of the poem, though the fact is fairly clear at that point). The poem is mostly clumsy and doesn’t really pass the “So what?” test—it certainly doesn’t stand up to the terrible events of 9/11, which is a risk every artist runs and few, if any, have avoided.
What else? There’s a poem (“Three Times Only”) about the instances in which she has seen her husband cry, yet there’s nothing particularly poignant or memorable in the poem. And there’s one about how, once, when waiting for the Metro, vexed by extreme heat and heavy shopping bags, she remembers a time when she was ten and saw a train that was lit up on the inside and didn’t stop. (The poem is called “In a Station of the Metro.” Hmm. Remakes rarely work. Though, at least she didn’t name one, “The Waste Land.”) The poem then tortures syntax to arrive at the point (I think) that the train represents for her “inexorability’s ease,” and she knows she can never get on that train. Uh, okay.
There are better poems in the book. “Doll Ritual”—which introduces the character/doll Ti-Anne, who/which reappears in the book, though not quite enough—is strange and exciting. The poem is one of the many from the perspective of a child, and one of the few that works. (The same tactic doesn’t work as well in “Jubilate South Philly: City 14” and “Running while Screaming,” for instance.) “Envy” takes chances and pays off, and “The Conference Notes” is a complicated and rewarding slide show of a longer poem.
But, ultimately, I’m left thinking about the poems that widely miss the mark. In the poem “Used One Speed, Princeton,” in which the speaker lets her mind wander while she tools around on her bicycle, we get this: “The houses dim, colors of soap, the shaped kind / you put in little dishes, that shrink and melt / to goo.” And the interestingly titled “Pablo Picasso Was Never Called an Asshole” quickly loses steam: “Clubs like erections / locked down over their steering columns.” On the other hand, the book’s cover art is delightful.
*
I was thrilled by my beat up old Mazda when I was 21 and single and saw a psychic for the first time (for some forgotten reason, my Dad bought readings for the lot of us). The psychic told me I’d be married by the time I was 21 and should think less about the brand new car I wanted so desperately.
In Domain of Perfect Affection, Robin Becker explores two independent yet interrelated topics—exile and the division of self. Exile, because of the innate human impulse to isolate oneself, and division of self because of the lack of identity one can be left with, however independent they become.
Though I never actually met Richard Meier, this review has all the makings of long-delayed revenge. I have here two of his poems from Slithy Toves, our high school literary magazine, which he edited more than 20 years ago. I torture him knowing full-well that my own early efforts similarly (but far more embarrassingly) exist; but I’m taking the risk to highlight the positive qualities which persist in Meier’s current book, Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar. And because I couldn’t resist. “To Rake,” an almost obsessive poem about yardwork, ends:
In an interview which accompanies reviewers’ copies of the book, Aleda Shirley says that “Dark Familiar is, in many ways, a dialogue with death, and the elegies in the book are both elegies for specific people, but also, I hope, something more than that: an attempt to preserve times that would otherwise be lost forever and the taking of a stance of strength in the face of grief and loss…” What interests me most about this quote is the plural, “people” (the rest of what she says is QED if you’ve read the book). Dark Familiar is a book of deep focus; the images and recurring types of thought are clearly delineated at the outset, the track they will run is the concave inner curve of the skull’s dome. Put another way: the book reads as if it has a story it won’t quite tell, and seems oriented by a central event it will sometimes detail but never fully disclose: the history of the love between the speaker and the perennial “you”—an apparently deceased “you,” though the speaker’s sense of loss is so fresh and profound, so alert to itself, that one can’t guess whether the (at least semi-illicit) lover was plucked from the world last week, last winter, or decades ago. Shirley is such an effective enforcer of mood that when I read in her bio that she lives with her husband, my first thought was that he must be incredibly jealous of her book-length pine for his lost cuckold. (Spare me the lecture on the lyric “I.” Shirley’s work is so obviously personal that I’m giving myself a pass on having jumped to conclusions.)
