by Amy Beeder
Carnegie Mellon University Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming
The Flavor of Chance
Amy Beeder’s debut is promising, but she’d do well to lay off the flowers a little. A highly observational book of poetry, Burn the Field occasionally gropes for subject matter, but has a great deal of sophistication and many surprising lines. Beeder’s at her best when she submits to her most absurd impulses. In “Cabezon,” one of the book’s better poems, she watches a stranger “shuffle up Washington street” as she drives by:
hands in your pockets, a smoke dangling slack
from the slit of your pumpking mouth;
humped over like the eel-man or geek
the dummy paid to sweep out gutters,
drown the cats. Where are you going now?
In this poem, the narrator sees something and meditates upon it. There are a number of poems like this, and many are good, but also read like “show-and-tell.”
Beeder’s absurdity can be a treat, and when their fusion with the book’s recurring themes and images yield the most promise. Two of the book’s best poems are among a handful involving roosters, the first of which is “Rooster Shadow.” The poem illustrates Beeder’s excellent ear: “and grackle black, grit-colored slivers of sparrow/or finch that grub for crumbs on every sidewalk.” And “The Cockfight” shows a dark side she may want to indulge a bit more:
…When the victor
climbed the corpse and spread his wings
and crowed—a long triumphant crow, we fled
from that plank court into a rainy street
winnings in our hands…
There’s also an intimacy with nature in Burn the Field that, at times, pays dividends: “When Heaven spoke through nature any cabbage/might show a rupture in the Human sphere.” But a lot of the book’s less exciting poetry comes when she gets a little too gushy about flowers and trees. This is where her show-and-tell description pays off the least. When it does work, however, it’s worth it, as in her short meditation on a “Photo of Pasteur”:
Up to his neck in beet juice & the favor of chance
with a crookneck flask, the man who, attending a lecture
on childbed fever at the Paris Academy
sprung up impatient, shouting—
I recommend the book and I think Beeder is skilled enough to hang around for a while; lines like these show how much fun she’d be if she’d just indulge her cues toward mania.
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