by Christien Gholson
Hanging Loose Press 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Double Daggers

On the Side of the Crow is Christien Gholson’s first book, but it reads like the work of an accomplished artist.  The book is a series of loosely related, tautly written prose poems, all titled like works of art in a museum.  Though I’m not convinced that the titles consistently illuminate the poems they head, Gholson proves a compelling curator, an enigmatic guide to our passage through his vividly original underworld. 

The poems feature recurring themes and characters, including Mae Sistore, a mysterious, goddess-like underground radical hiding from the FBI.  Though incognito, she has inspired a huge gathering of protesters protesting nothing.  TV pictures are beamed worldwide, but each person must find out the meaning of this protest for themselves.  Mae’s underground nature is almost too literal, as she is presented as a force of nature more than a realistic character.  As she tells us in “Thieves: Abstract in Silver and Red,” “The rocks beneath your feet are telling you it’s time,” and later,

“your own blood knows,” she said.  The sax imitated the sound of blood and the couple danced around the room.

If Gholson limited himself to conventional narratives or character sketches, this obviousness would wear thin, but he knows how to use our expectations to his advantage with the professional efficiency of a street performer. Though seemingly improvised, these poems are highly formalized and the action is carefully controlled.  What seems on first read to be a lightning bolt turns out to be the carefully timed triggering of a flashbulb.  The characters are often puppets, sometimes in the most savagely literal sense.   One poem ends “an invisible hand slips up through his bowels, pulls a cord of tiny bells the length of his body.”  More sympathetically, “Swimmers Beneath the Street: A Cave Painting” starts with a cinematic description of truck lights crossing “the wall behind a caged basement window.  Two figures on a bed.  Gutter water overflows into a window well.”  Then Gholson sets the show in motion: Zak is dancing behind the dumpster “like a puppet in the rain.” When Zak finds himself watched, he says,

“do you want to kiss me?” That is what Zak always said when he caught someone watching him dance… To his surprise the little man walked up to him, rose on tiptoes and touched his lips to Zak’s neck.  Nothing more.

Zak is surprised by the man’s response, even though Zak has asked his question many times.  The opening frame suggests that he has found a lover, though the “Nothing more” suggests that Zak is doomed to isolated moments of contact.
The poem ends with a single line recalling the initial still life, transposing it from sight to sound: “The room rings with the constant shock of water against iron.”  This helps make the poem a description of a cycle as well as a touching character sketch. In this light, the painting, the artwork and the character are all manifestations of nature caught in tragically momentary forms, spirits achingly real, but doomed to be returned to the material they were made from, like Pinocchio in reverse.  The effect somewhat recalls Keats’s Grecian Urn or Dante’s description of Paolo and Francesca in hell, but Gholson does them one better by multiplying  the frames: the simple wooden proscenium of a puppet show, the formal frame of the camera shot, and the natural processes of water rusting iron.  This is not the mindless multiplication of the picture of the boy holding a can of Dutch Boy paint on which is a picture of a boy holding a can of Dutch Boy paint ad infinitum.  Our viewpoint is complex but not untenable.  The juggling of visual and sonic clues, the contrast between the framing of a photograph and water’s eternal, erosive flow helps to create texture and depth in the poem, an unexpected ledge just wide enough to keep us from falling.

Because Gholson also insists on the mundane realities of nature, including worms flushed out of holes by the rain, his formalized scenes don’t harden into distant, classical marble, or melt under the garish lights of a wax museum.  Another recurring motif is the tumbling of a jumbo tub of popcorn thrown across a movie screen, backlit by the opening credits.  In “Saturday Matinee: Collage Made From the Refuse Found on a Movie Theater Floor,” (pace, mad Curator!)  the audience (mostly children) realizes that this moment is “the most beautiful thing that will happen to them in any theater.  Ever.  And they know it.  The walls of the theater shake with ear-ringing screams of pure joy.”

A poem describing a night of magnificently drunken self-pity by two fucked-up characters in a weed-choked junkyard ends on an unexpectedly redemptive  note: “In the morning, the air is as sharp as sun on water.” Given that the sentence is separated from the body of the poem, we will never know if those characters have learned anything.  Maybe their drunken declaration of magnificence is only true if they are absent from the scene.  The author does not save or damn, reminding us that nature is unknowable.  Though you can talk to her on the phone like an old lover, Mae Sistore can never be found, she has been dead for a long time. 

Though sometimes overly telegraphed, Gholson’s effects are almost never cheap. If he pushes us over a cliff, a parachute may or may not deploy, but his basic honesty ensures that we don’t escape unscathed.  These poems are as grotesque, brutal and touching as a circus, and as natural as tree bark.  Highly original, both natural and tightly controlled, On the Side of the Crow demonstrates the continued vitality of the prose poem, both individually, and as part of a sequence.

I can’t close without a nagging quibble about the typeface: what’s with the periods shaped like crosses?  And the colons shaped like the double dagger symbol for deceased?  It’s disconcerting to see what appear to be diamonds turning into crosses before your eyes as you zoom in. Why should the punctuation call attention to itself here?  In a different mood, I might be persuaded that this helps Gholson’s poems by increasing your awareness of the surface of the page, just as coming too close to a painting increases your awareness of the surface of canvas and paint.  I admit that most people don’t look that closely at the printed page, but some of us are wall-eyed, and we should not be ashamed of looking at the world that way.

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