by Michael Earl Craig
Fence Books 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

Musings of a Private Mule

Michael Earl Craig opens his second book, Yes, Master, in praise of anvils: “..the anvil / rewards you with impact, with rebound, / the inverse of your efforts.”

As Wallace Stevens once dictated, when one decides to put faith in the finding of small satisfactions—in people, things, and the imaginative associations they imply—it is perhaps implicit that some items are, by nature, more worthy of praise than others: “Your favorite pipe could be smacked from your mouth. / This will never happen with the anvil.” Absurd Craig chooses the anvil, and ends the poem—titled “This is How an Anvil Comes to You”—with a random transition to the anvil’s heavy relative, the anchor:

Even an anchor…have I mentioned the anchor?
Even an anchor must be dropped
(they call it “lowering”)
and sometimes dragged.
How so totally sad is the anchor.
Let us take a minute to stop here and pray
for this pitiful object.

Welcome to the weird little world of Michael Earl Craig. You won’t want to leave.

Yes, Master is the natural successor to Craig’s excellent first book, Can You Relax in My House, but displays even cleaner, more fully realized poems. His poems are hilarious, but not without stoicism; absurd but not indulgently so; hidden and insane but not without affection. If you tend to enjoy non sequiturs, humor, and surreal imagery in the tradition of, say, James Tate, buy this book now.

A sense of humor is one of Craig’s most potent weapons. “I know it’s not healthy to worship / any one gun,” he posits in “Gathering My Thoughts About You,” before switching gears and regarding “the munching and gasses of beasts / in the black pasture.” His deft ability to construct unforgettable two-liners also accounts for his ability to invite a reader into his poems. The openings to his poems are never forceful: “Something came to mind this morning: / a pudding esplanade,” he writes in the opening to “Ways of Dealing.” And later in the poem, a fine example of his willingness to poetry in the minutiae of pop culture: “Ideal for Sigourney Weaver tombstone: / You saw my panties in Alien.”

Indeed Craig’s use of humor underscores the therapy of humor; in “Seahorse” he recalls “laughing so hard I fell down” after reading the Sonny Bono obituary that serves as the poem’s epigraph:

“It was a Fantasy Island gig that convinced Bono he needed to
leave Hollywood. He had one line and botched it, calling Tattoo
‘Pontoon.’ When the actor started screaming at him, Bono
decided it was time to get a new life.”

—USA Today, Wed. Jan. 7, 1998

Craig has done the reader a favor by simply reprinting this inherently comic obituary, and does credit to Bono, who emerges as a sort of hero, bent on giving up on the absurd fakery of Hollywood culture. Really any poem would be a worthwhile excuse just to print this epigraph, but the poem that follows it becomes backwards and comical:

looking up, glancing down again,
as I drive my newly lacquered motorcoach
up an icy mountain pass at dusk
on my way to see my therapist
who once spent 3 years in the circus with
her “Largest Tits in North America.”
She always cries during our sessions.

Craig is then a sympathetic poet, and all his characters are tragicomic heroes. The strangeness here, coupled with the confession that he sees a therapist, shows Craig’s understanding that good poetry is of course built on more than being jokey. His absurdist/sarcastic leanings also lend themselves to a wholly unique, powerful lyricism. These lines, for example, close “Poem”: “terrifically / is… / …how a castle flashes. / Are you familiar with how a castle flashes?”

That brand of strangeness shows again a poet putting faith in his own imagination and nothing else. Any person, then, ought to consider doing the same, as he points in the (albeit, extraneous) conclusion to “Ways of Dealing”: “You can’t leave it to me to describe your world.”  Craig’s world also becomes interesting, because he seems as far from the poet-careerist bitch-match in contemporary poetry as possible. He lives near Livingston, Montana, where he works as a farrier—accounting, perhaps for the anvil and for the horses that come up time and again in the book: “A horse is walked before me / and needs her toes shortened.”

Craig’s poetry is ultimately a poetry of compassion. He shows in “I’m Glad I Found the Horse Doc” a fury that seems characteristic of a bout with depression. Where Craig can use his absurdist powers to charm and dazzle, he can also use them to frighten: “Another cat, asleep on the freeway rumblestrip.” And on rare occasions, he’s plain blunt: “Some days I want to kill.”

But by and large he seems interested in helping himself and helping the reader, and he succeeds. “I’ll Fight Depression For You” offers one of the book’s finest lyrical moments, full of tongue-in-cheek compassion in urging people to beat depression:

But one can always punch one’s way out of it
like the grand manatee erupting from a bad dream
to bust through five inches of ice
on the surface of the sea

The notion that an anvil rewards a person with the inverse of his or her efforts returns near the end, when the “Horse Doc” puts him in a better mood: “He tells me ‘one man’s journey / the inverse of another’s.’” Everyone, then, finds their own way. Craig has envisioned the modern poem in a way that invites readers in and keeps them there. The poems are short and satisfying, fully realized while not slap-in-the-face ambitious. Not every poem is perfect, and a few suffer from a touch of over-statedness, but the fresh moments cancel these out by a long shot; in the end, you’ll find Craig’s poems generally improve the quality of your life.

I’ll leave you with some of my favorite two-liners: “I’d like to see just once / the rabbit box this hawk.” “I’ve just shaved my beard and head / and feel like a baby turtle.” “My cheeseburger comes at me / through the drive up window.” “We wave but don’t expect / to be seen. It is always this way.” If Craig’s answer to that paradox is to follow Stevens’s dictum and put faith in the imagination, he goes so far as to half-heartedly deify himself in the book’s final poem. For posterity, here’s that little poem, titled “Prayer,” in its entirety:

As I hold my head low
I see the many flecks of black pepper
on my placemat.
They look like horses
running away from me at a great distance.

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