Panic
by Laura McCullough
Alice James Books 2011
Reviewed by Rachel Bara
“…less than half a cigarette’s time”
Shore towns of New Jersey with community pools, splintered boardwalks, and trashy dance clubs provide the setting for Laura McCullough’s searing fourth collection of poems, Panic. McCullough navigates the lives of the shore’s denizens, tracking their responses to a world of shabby artifice and ineluctable danger. For example, “Sun Dog, Moon Ring, Glory” begins:
What is the opposite of decapitation,
a clean-through, laser-like amputation
of a girl’s feet in midair
on a ride at the Sea Bright Pier?
As the sun goes down in the town of Sea Bright, the speaker looks for “mock suns” and “halos,” optical distortions of sun and moon, while also observing the frantic energy of the pier. Within many of McCullough’s poems, single events can shift past like waves between swimmers. In “Bartering and the Myth of Shells,” a toddler “bit[es] into a water toy” and the poem examines the moments that follow. For the child, the experience happens slowly; she dreams as she tongues and tastes the “tiny beads” that fill her mouth “like dessicated blood / or the cracked open egg case of an endangered beetle.” Simultaneously, the mother moves to “scoop the child into the basket of her hips” and splashes “chlorinated water / into her daughter’s gaping mouth.” Finally, the lifeguard’s late “Is she okay?” startles the mother. Mind and body betray her:
The mother thinks the earbuds against his throat
look like shells
she wants to reach out and touch
with the tips of her fingers
suddenly as foreign
as anemones at the ends of her lithe and freckled arms
instead of hands.
By pairing the mother’s impulse to “touch” the lifeguard with the image of a sea anemone’s tentacles, McCullough limns the mother’s curiosity and imagination reminiscent of the child’s. The long sentence broken across seven lines slows perception and strains the moment, skillfully situating the reader within the mother’s body.
Like August Kleinzahler’s Storm Over Hackensack, McCullough’s homage to New Jersey calls attention to the detritus of cigarette butts and pizza boxes as often as seashells and egg cases. McCullough’s exploration of death lends poignancy to both. A grieving mother in “Scattered” asks: “[H]ow could it happen in less than half a cigarette’s time?” As if stretching the instant before realization, McCullough situates loss in ordinary details:
The white tube between her stained fingers leaving her hand,
arcing toward the weeds by the fence—
the landscaping hadn’t been maintained well this year,
a scattering of garbage here and there;
hopefully nothing combustible.Could she really have thought about that?
The poem dramatizes guilt and shows how it can set in one thought at a time. For the mother, meditation abruptly turns to rage as she contemplates her son’s willful body: “She’d been angry for years / at this jumping, squirming, flailing, rowing away, // and here he’d gone under and away, / and she smoking and jumping in too late.”
While many of her poems enter the minds of mothers, McCullough also engenders the consciousnesses of men, specifically senior citizens, construction workers, and lifeguards. In “Collection Pockets,” she captures a teenager’s fluctuating voice and sense of responsibility, as well as the relationship between two guards, the one who stops by “to get the phone he’d left behind” and the one on-duty who asked him to “Hang there a minute, / so he could go take a piss . . . .” The experience of the off-duty lifeguard, suddenly called upon to give CPR, recalls the earbuds of the earlier poem: “The music inside him ratcheted up as he pressed the white chest / with his crossed palms closing down / against the mother’s cries . . . .” His erratic perception contrasts with the mother’s numbed memory. Poems that follow reveal the way the guard’s failure to save the boy links him to the mother.
McCullough’s reliance on trauma as a central theme can be overwhelming and sometimes theatrical. But by featuring more poems about lifeguards than bereft mothers, Panic moves beyond the motions of grief and loss to contemplate new life. In “Severance,” we learn of a former lifeguard’s pregnant wife. Reaching towards the simplicity of joy, the speaker remarks: “She is growing happier. / Soon they will know the gender, / and his mouth goes dry / at the thought of a son . . . .” McCullough’s poems hinge on a hopeful future. People return to those shimmering pools, observe fireworks from the sea wall in Sea Bright, and the air and water—like the best of these poems—offer a momentary release.
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