by Clay Matthews
Ghost Road Press 2008
Reviewed by Jackie Clark
Horse Hope
I like placing two dollar bets and playing a horse for show, which means you think your horse will either come in first, second, or third. Playing for show never really amounts to winning big, but if you’re good at drawing inferences from the little stories about each horse printed in the stat booklet, your two dollars can last for all ten races.
A Superfecta in the horse racing world means that you select the first four finishers in exact order. This kind of bet is made with blind certainty: a sense of faith in what you are about to bet on, or a sense of hope that your intuition proves to be the real deal. Depending on your wager, you can either win big, or—well, you know the old maxims as well as I do.
In “Elegy for a Bet that Couldn’t Lose,” Matthews postures exactly this:
And then language takes over
as a sort of resonate emotion, and we stumble
into the sound as much as we stumble into the need
to move forward—superfecta, trifecta, quinella, exacta,exactly what we didn’t realize we asked for when we gave
prayer another try in the bathroom this morning.
The poems in Superfecta all hinge on this idea of broken faith, on the need to, as Matthews says, move forward, despite prior disappointments, and give prayer a second chance. But these aren’t “God” poems. They are earnest engines that propel themselves with their own uncertainty of both the external and the internal. Matthews is constantly conscious of the way he impacts his surroundings and the way his surroundings impact him.
Matthews is most successful when he simply documents these observations. For instance, in the poem “Self-Help for the Lost and Found,” he observes:
When you walk out of a lot
of these flea markets, it’s kind of similar to walking
out of those enormous gothic churches, of walking
out of the darkness and into the light. The best
thing every time is how surprised you are
at what time of day it really is, and how alive
in a completely different way the rest of the world
becomes, and always was so far as you can tell.
This is precisely the same feeling one gets when leaving a movie matinee. What is surprising is the feeling of your own absence, the curious way you wonder what, if anything, goes on in the world when you aren’t around. This tension is believable and frustrating and reassuring all at once. When Matthews says,
I say truly
and I mean it. I say I mean it and I mean I mean
nothing, and cannot say anything truly. I have
no preoccupations at this moment other than this
and the smell of gasoline on my fingers.
I believe him. I can smell the gasoline on his fingers. He is hopeful that each little moment means something, but wouldn’t be surprised if he discovered otherwise.
I lost count of how many times the word hope appears in this book, but just a haphazard inventory of last lines (“What is beautiful is that they will do this again tomorrow”; “a hot meal and cup of coffee for every last thing crawling home”; “If there is a god then I guess it’s just as well”; “to that dark blue motel that continues to wait at the end”) and you understand the way Matthews chooses to rectify these tensions. Are the endings sometimes too tidy? Yes, but I don’t think they can help it.
This tidiness is indirectly addressed in the aptly titled poem “Regarding My Sentimentality and Love of Hole-in-the-Walls.” I dig self-acknowledged earnestness. That being said, the use of certain colloquial catch phrases made popular by movies, now probably referred to as “camp,” like “do you feel / lucky, punk, well, do you?” and “well, then, sue me,” deflate the I’m-so-uncertain-I’m-certain tension in those poems. Intended or not, this takes away from more interesting, intimate lines like “the sad shadow / of Nebraska corn.”
Most poems in Superfecta are chunky and chatty and filled with segues and stream-of-conscious meanderings. For example, “Broadcast of Another Speech about Forever” begins by setting the scene of the poet sitting on the couch watching the NFL Hall of Fame speeches. He mentions how John Madden is announced to come out and speak and the word “announce” sets of this memory for the poet:
now that I’ve said announce
all I can think about are those terrible camps I went to as a kid,
where in the cafeteria if anyone had anything to say, everyoneelse would sing this song about announcements, a terrible
death to die, a terrible death to talk to death. I always hated bullshit
songs like that, and coming back and coming back to John Madden, sportscasterextraordinaire, maybe talking out way out of this life
and into the other is the best option possible.
Non sequiturs like this find their way into many of these poems. I assume that most poets want their readers to feel some kind of connection to his or her poems, but the poems in Superfecta never let you forget that they know you are out there, potentially reading them and relating.
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