by Andrew Allport
Proem Press 2008
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson
“Flies gather all over him.”
The Ice Ship & Other Vessels, Andrew Allport’s first chapbook, explores the ways in which we mask our perceptions of mortality, whether consciously or not. In the first poem, “An Unknown Shore: Variations on a Fragment by Oppen,” Allport repeats several lines with slight variances. By the middle of the poem, the lines “Cortez arrives. / he is absolutely lost / at an unknown shore, and he is enraptured” have transformed to “Cortez arrives too late. / the shore is absolutely barren, the men lost / to starvation and rapture.” The turn of events is chilling, and though the details of these events are not disclosed and the wordplay borders on tedious, Allport has successfully created an environment filled with decay and terminus. Our poet likes to linger in open parentheticals, and “Unknown Shore” ends as such: “(this is the nature of disaster.” The end of the poem strikes me as too much of a summation, but is interesting as it is consistent with Allport’s stratagem. As sodden as the chapbook may be in ends, it is the closure of this poem that is the most difficult to digest.
While many poems in this short collection deal with “death” in a traditional way, some are more surprising and innovative. These are the best. “The Papermakers,” for instance, suggests that sometimes the relief that can be found in an ending is so valuable that the sufferings endured on the road to that end are justified, or at least are worthy of focus. Allport writes of “the solace of the idea of disaster.” The word “idea” changes things a bit, since disaster has not actually struck; however, the residuum is the same. Allport has a good thing going until the subsequent line, in which he compares the eliminative power of disaster to the ever-popular “clean page.” (He makes a similar misstep in “Self-Erasing Love Poem” with the first lines: “Like a photographer my fantasies of reproduction / were negative.” Mmm…photographs, negatives.)
One of the brightest poems in The Ice Ship is “The Late Address of Captain Shane T. Adcock.” Adcock, which Allport explains in his notes, died in Iraq and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. The tone of this poem is unsurprisingly apocalyptic; what surprises is Allport’s ability to maintain hope for his reader amid rather bleak scenes. He writes, “No event ever stops spinning.” This line is perfectly sentimental, delicate while sharp. And later in the poem, “a sound heard underneath a thousand others” reminds us that humans are one tiny faction of a branching planet/galaxy/universe/other, but that we can nevertheless be proud to add to its layers. Appropriately, Allport handles his poems with extraordinary care.
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