by James Kimbrell
Sarabande Books 2006
Reviewed by John Deming
Distance=Time
I was thrilled by my beat up old Mazda when I was 21 and single and saw a psychic for the first time (for some forgotten reason, my Dad bought readings for the lot of us). The psychic told me I’d be married by the time I was 21 and should think less about the brand new car I wanted so desperately.
I figured my suspicions correct that she and her kind were hokey novelties and purveyors of easy answers. So maybe I’m a boring pragmatist, but when I saw the title of James Kimbrell’s new book, I half-wondered why a promising poet would center a book on one of those arbitrary romancers. But Kimbrell’s response, evident early on, is a resounding “why not”—and out of nowhere, the use of a psychic is one of many ways to knowingly employ the imagination as a means to raise the dead. “Hocus-pocus in a purchased dark” aside, how can any one person—especially after a significant loss—say for sure “Why / anything is true.”
The title poem is the first in the book and is the last to mention a psychic; what ensues is a series in which mystical why-nots hover over hard lamentations. Our narrator grieves the loss of a relationship and the loss of his mother, leaving him a state of psychological disrepair that grounds him and his readers in one of American poetry’s favorite truths: that anything interesting, odd or ironic can and should pass as truth, just for the hell of it. It’s not a new idea, and not everything in My Psychic wins big, but it’s a consoling look at grief and the impossibly hopeful ways people can strike back at it.
There are many poets that, no matter how grief-stricken they are in their personal lives, never get in to specifics. The aesthetic reasons for doing this are obvious—as is the notion that one would like to avoid being a diva at all costs—but to do it is not a crime, since it can be done well. In promotional material accompanying My Psychic, Kimbrell discusses why much of this quiet second book deals with personal grief:
If you’re grieving, then the world you present is a world
conditioned on grief. Externalizing that grief and giving it
aesthetic shape is a process that I undertook, but I didn’t do
it hoping for relief. I did hope that someone might read one
of the poems and that it would help them feel less lonely in
their own grief.
If for some poets the second book is the chance to finally unleash the virtuosic experimental side they couldn’t have gotten away with before, Kimbrell’s hope for his book is satisfyingly subtle. The memorable 15-part centerpiece, a poem titled “Love had a thousand shapes…” makes the book a good gift for someone who is grieving. The entire poem deals with the 2000 death of his mother, Margaret Lack Kimbrell. In one furrow-the-brow scene, the narrator recalls that when he was a child, his mother would stare out the kitchen window “for what seemed like hours”:
…Not until last year did I ask what she had been looking at: Pears on the shed roof, she said. The clothesline, her answer on another day. When I asked again she said, I was worried your father wouldn’t come home. And after that—You weren’t old enough to understand. One day she’d start: We were still in love and your father was working. The next she’d reconsider: Everyone drank too much then.
A lot of the work in My Psychic also succeeds from a technical standpoint. He moves from ironclad syllabics to prose poems to more open forms with apparent ease, recalling poets from Shelley to Hall and letting words like “covereth” drip with irony. The poems are chiseled and precise, with one line falling with natural rhythm into the next. Inevitably, a lot of the work is so spit-shined and symmetrical that some of the weak moments, given equal weight, have a way of jutting out. He’s a little too soft, for example, when a cloud looks like a getaway car and the jaded narrator wants to drive “that pillowy racer down my ex’s street / because my closest friend is still her absence,” and later in the poem, when he gets the Meat Loaf award for being “willing / to steal anything for love.”
But it should also go on record that Kimbrell might be one of the only poet-teachers in recent history to write about teaching a college course without a sense of “I have nothing better to write about” bleeding through. Still reeling from a broken relationship, the narrator’s blackboard question for the hour is “Is love fair?”:
…Who cares? is what these two
might say, arriving as they do each day, hand
in hand, his shirt wrinkled as a bed sheet,
her’s all midriff, hardly there. I want to say,
“Don’t look so bored! High above you
is the ‘chairness’ of chair. And it’s a classic!”
But they aren’t bored. They’re in love. Small
difference, but nonetheless. Their days still
passion-shocked, brimming, over-blessed…
In the eighth section of “Love had a thousand shapes…” the narrator describes making phone calls to inform friends and relatives of his mother’s death. His voice, he realizes, becomes the voice of shock, of “a necessary delusion expired, the end of the lie we all tell one another each time we touch before departing: I’ll see you again, the world will stay the same.” In a lot of contemporary poetry, sadness-driven narrative leads over-stated, sappy self-indulgence. Kimbrell’s able to hold back and concede that part to mysticism. Finally time has less to do with before-and-after than it does with distance; since everyone is either dead or will be, it becomes silly to haggle over who died when. To view the past simply requires perspective from a metaphysical distance. Past and present, it seems, can be given equal weight; from this vantage point, the narrator is able to look upon his mother again:
…To look at us from this
distance you might say we were happy then.
Grass growing over the sidewalk’s edges. Slight
breeze. Lights coming on in the pastel houses.
*
