by Mekeel McBride
Carnegie Mellon University Press 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

Holy, Terrible Flowers

David Young blurbs that Mekeel McBride is a poet of variety “in a climate where poets sometimes get praised for doing one particular thing over and over.” Indeed, the world that McBride develops in Dog Star Delicatessen: New and Selected Poems 1979-2006 shifts from familiar to otherworldly to just plain fantastic. The book proves that over the course of her career, McBride’s imagination has been limitless, as has her ability to represent a spectrum of emotions in poetry.  Inspiration is abundant in this collection and McBride refuses to ignore the upbeat—an attribute that seems particularly courageous in the present global climate. 

Some may call McBride a flowery poet, and it’s hard to argue when the first poem of Dog Star Delicatessen is entitled “Flower.” But, I suppose, even a flower has its rugged side, and this particular blossom “says Fuck you and really means it. / This flower is pollinated by the dead.”  By the poem’s culmination, this coarseness is presented not as cynicism, but as determination: “This flower is a holy terror.”

To imply that McBride’s poetry is devoid of the sardonic or disconsolate would be incorrect.  She has a natural balance of hope and despair, and in some cases, suggests a person creates his or her own happiness or unhappiness.  “Bella,” for example, offers three characters in very different psychological states.  The speaker’s neighbor finds rot in one of his walls when building an addition; he’s freakishly happy as he tells the speaker that he wound up tearing down the whole house, and presently lives in his garage. Though he’s hopeful, the speaker puts herself in his place and thinks, “…I’ve died, in my own mind at least, / from cold-induced dementia.”  She is overwhelmed by the idea of starting over, of losing all that she has already established. Her neighbor’s dog Bella offers a third perspective; she frolics in the broken ground where a new foundation will be laid.

At other times McBride isn’t so explicit.  On occasion, she uses long, slow couplets to create a deep loneliness. “The Well,” for instance, has a tragic setting, yet the source of tension lies elsewhere, imperceptible.  We never discover if a trapped child escapes the well or dies there, but coming to such a resolution is not the poem’s intention.  The solitude suggests anyone could have been—has been—forgotten in that well.  Despite the poem’s graveness there is always the element of hope and desire:

Sometime much later, a mouse brings her a petal.
It could have brought a golden kernel of corn,
a grain of rice.  That part doesn’t matter.

“Available Light” is perhaps the most inspiring poem in the book; without being syrupy, it manages to suggest hope, faith, adaptation, and survival against the worst of odds.  The speaker keeps geraniums indoors through the winter despite the belief of nursery workers that the flowers won’t survive.  The plant, like the speaker, reshapes itself to the available light in order to survive, and to go beyond survival, to thrive. 

Even when McBride deals directly with overwhelmingly somber topics like death, she succeeds in bringing vibrancy and life to the poem, as in “Orchard.”  A friend has died and the speaker remembers the last time she saw him:

nova bursts of tie-dye—the exuberant
and wholly unexpected color of his undershirt

like one of those gorgeous photographs the Hubble
sends back of a new universe taking shape in a place
so far away its almost impossible to imagine.

In a single death the speaker imagines, even creates, an entire new universe; loss is impossible to fully understand, but beauty can still be found in what we don’t completely comprehend.  The poem, then, hints at the infinite.

The idea that everything makes a whole is an important aspect of McBride’s work.  For each poem that describes or identifies with loss there is another, equally moving, that details how to put the pieces back together, or how to continue with one less piece and still be whole. In “Like a Gospel Singer Swan-Winged in Hallelujahs,” the speaker realizes that she hasn’t been appreciating life; late for work, stuck in traffic and construction, she hasn’t even taken “the time / to look for turtles sunning in the sand.” 

Undoubtedly, Mekeel McBride has always been exceptional at writing about animals.  Dog Star offers plenty of these, and probably the best example is selected from her last book, The Deepest Part of the River.  “The Goldfish” is staged around the life and death of a feeder-fish and the relationship the speaker has with it.  She takes care of the fish until it slowly, irreversibly sickens. The speaker is helpless and left to watch the “golden thing” suffer.  It is this natural coupling of beauty and terror that characterizes McBride’s work, that the suffering of an ornamental fish must resonate outward to

…a child chained somewhere

in a basement, starving; the droop-eyed man,
cooking up, in a cast-iron kettle, germ stew
that will end the world.

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