by Matthew Zapruder
Copper Canyon Press 2010
Reviewed by Kathleen Rooney
“…a little digital hope.”
“Growth is always loss.” So says psychologist James Hillman in his book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. His statement is probably pretty true in general, but it also seems particularly applicable to Matthew Zapruder’s third collection, Come On All You Ghosts. Because what Hillman also means is “The imagination changes.” Yes. Zapruder’s hip, lyrical imagination, the one that powered his first two books, American Linden and The Pajamaist, is still in force here, but it is different: older and not necessarily wiser, per se, but even more open than before. The speaker of these poems admits he is no longer young, but he remembers that he once was, and he writes of those who still are, speculating in the poem “Global Warming”: “The young. / Maybe they’ll let us be in their dreams.” Meanwhile, he acknowledges that he is becoming, or has become, one of the “people of middle/indeterminate age” of whom he also writes.
The edgy and Post-Avant sensibilities for which Zapruder has come to be known are still present as well, but they have been tempered with elegy and aging. The book is in large part “about” the biggest loss of all: death, including those of the poet’s father, of David Foster Wallace, of Robert Creeley, of Kenneth Koch and numerous others. But the collection is also about a loss of certainty, and a shift to an older perspective in which the observer gets stripped of his youthful confidence, thereby becoming better able, as he puts it in the poem “Pocket,” to try “standing in an actual stance of mystery / and not knowing towards the world.”
Zapruder begins one of the book’s most lovely and representative poems, “Grace Paley,” with the blunt statement that “People say they don’t understand poetry,” then continues, “Meaning how must we proceed.” Zapruder proceeds with a graceful movement back and forth between the past of his youth, and the present of his middle-age. Here is a lengthy passage, but the length is necessary to capture the sense of motion, of growth and loss:
I was thirteen, Earth
was a couch, without any irritable reaching
after fact or reason I placed thousands of
Sweet Tarts into my mouth. Five years
later someone said they saw Diane P.
kissing a girl in a car, and they punched
the window on the passenger side
in and I laughed, and it’s all been as
people say downhill from there, meaning
until this moment I have been coasting,
but from this one forward Grace I vow
I shall coast no more.
This section is typical of the gentle slaloming feeling—inevitable, never forced—that Zapruder’s poems have as they slide toward conclusions that are surprising, but apt.
Other reviews have already said that these poems are beautiful, and they are. As in his previous books, Zapruder delivers erudite descriptions of such things as “the hoarse glassy call / of the black American crow” and a colleague’s desk, which “is a medium-sized wooden lake / on which float two staplers.” He sounds like a discerning critic—a refined reviewer of life itself—when he observes in the poem “Prelude” that Diet Coke:
…tastes
like nothing plus the idea of chocolate,
or an acquaintance of chocolate
speaking fondly of certain times
it and chocolate had spoken of nothing,
or nothing remembering a field
in which it once ate the most wondrous
sandwich of ham and rustic chambered cheese
yet still wished for a piece of chocolate
before the lone walk back through
the corn then the darkening forest
to the disappointing village and its super
creepy bed and breakfast.
At the same time, though, these poems also wonder what the point of any of this—of beauty, of thinking, of writing poems, of living, etc.—really is.
In “You Have Astounding Cosmic News,” for instance, he writes, in an ostensible open letter to sociologists, “we’ve been conducting field experiments into our private thoughts. One / faction next to the soul shaped watercooler wonders whether / there’s any reason at all to remember the feeling of being a child.” These are thoughtful poems, which is to say they are poems in which the speaker frequently mentions his own act of thinking, declaring at one point, “I am getting ready to have important thoughts,” and at another, “I see sad crushed plastic / everywhere and put / some thoughts composed / of words that do not / belong together / together and feel / a little digital hope.” And, perhaps in keeping with his shift from a youthful knowing to an older wondering, as he thinks about his thoughts, they become less and less familiar. “When I think very hard / about my thoughts,” he writes, “they seem / to me to be very small horses / attached to invisible reins / attached to facts.”
Throughout the collection, Zapruder’s poetic persona seems concerned with its own authority: What can he say? What should he be saying? Plenty of poems and poets have covered this turf, with the more language-y ones tending to conclude that there is little to no such authority to begin with—that words inevitably fail, that communication is bound to break down. Yet while Zapruder’s poems are playful and funny, he makes it clear he’s not just playing around. His poems posit that something is at stake, or at least that something ought to be. And the book, though not linked together with any overall story or clearcut throughline, does suggest an arc, the speaker starting out with these doubts, grappling with them, and concluding: yes, I can make meaning and I can make it in such a way that this meaning can keep being made after I am gone. Communication can, does, and should occur. In a way, Come On All You Ghosts poses, wrestles directly and indirectly with, and finally answers yes to the question of whether poetry can matter.
Zapruder ends the book with the 14-page title poem whose last stanza expresses a satisfaction of sorts about what he—as a person and as a poet—is trying to do, and that when it’s his turn to become a ghost himself, he will:
…have done my best to leave
behind this machine
anyone with a mind
who cares can enter.
*
Thom Gunn died on April 25, 2004, three days before photos of torture from Abu-Ghraib were revealed. At the time, Osama bin Laden was nowhere in sight, the twin towers were a crushing memory, American soldiers labored in Iraq despite a year-old presidential declaration of “mission-accomplished,” and terrorists bred terrorists all the while. In his elegy “For Thom Gunn,” poet Garrett Caples laments, “i’m sorry you had to die a time when evil’s got this country by the balls…”
If you’re wondering what a “pajamaist” is I can tell you for sure that it is a kind of grand metaphor; it has to be, as Matthew Zapruder makes the following important disclosure early on in the titular poem: