by Taylor Altman
Sunnyoutside 2008
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson
“little occurrences / become catastrophes”
In her first book, Taylor Altman highlights the neutral essence of time and the emotional traumas that result from the death of her narrator’s father. The poems are consistently melancholy, drab, numb. Appropriate for the subject matter. However, the consistency of the landscape in Swimming Back becomes distracting, makes the poems feel repetitive and prohibits the narration from achieving any sense of progression. The opening poem, “Fog,” is one of her best.
The obstacle “Fog” has to overcome is the same obstacle many poems in this book have to overcome. Altman often relies on her impulse to “reinvent” cliché. In “Fog,” the narrator skirts around the admission of a void; many objects in the poem are “empty”; a dog begs by the door, hoping for an opportunity to escape. The narrator is also looking for an escape, an exit. The tone of the poem is well-established, but has nowhere to go. Altman writes, “Lobstermen / come back with empty traps, maybe a boot // that floated up.” The boot is boring, but what follows is unexpected: “from the carcass of a whale.” Suddenly, I’m reminded of Pinnochio, Gepetto, Monstro…and sneezing. But I don’t know where to go from there.
What’s most interesting in “Fog” is the final image. “On the jetty, someone has left a wetsuit, // arms spread wide on that vacant space of rock, / as if embracing a thing which has no name.” The wetsuit is indicative of the speaker’s feelings of loss and abandonment, the attempt to grasp the ungraspable or reconnect with someone who is no longer physically accessible. The lines are reminiscent of Mark Strand’s in “The Night, The Porch.” He writes, “baring oneself / To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.” Where Strand’s narrator allows himself to wallow in the unknown, to feel its presence and stand in awe of it, Altman’s attempts control, is unable to produce an emotional response and so projects her sensations onto her surroundings. “Fog” achieves a measure of stasis that other poems in this book attempt to achieve. Most don’t come close. The poem is full of rhythm, and occassional end-stopped lines add to a veiled, but general sadness. The poem has a thoughtful and internal pace; it is slow and solemn, but peaceful.
Nearly every poem in the collection deals with the speaker’s inability to form an emotional response to the loss of her father. Instead, she interacts with, or imposes herself upon, her environment. In “Bees,” a young speaker is stung by – a bee. However, she, once again, seems numb to the experience, and, at first, doesn’t notice that she has been stung. Once she does become cognizant of what has happened, she doesn’t cry like might be expected of a young girl. The stinger is removed and the only thing the speaker is aware of is “a pair of hands / pushing [her] into the yard again. / And the summer afternoon goes on, unchanged.” The idea here seems to be that the external world ignores the difficult experiences of its inhabitants. Again, from “The Night, The Porch”: “There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there / Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.” The universe was never sensitive to humans’ existence; it has little regard for humankind’s self-importance. The speaker in Altman is relying on human support; she fears the overwhelming and inevitable absence that Strand’s speaker has made his religion.
The passing of each poem mimics the passing of time on earth. The only change in the rural and residential landscape is the change in seasons. However, as time passes, the mood of the speaker darkens. In fact, “The Girls at the Pool” makes reference to suicide. Altman’s narrator feels like an outcast, is alienated and isolated from the other girls her age. The other girls recognize this division. It is tangible, and they stare intensely and cruelly at her. Altman writes:
…Their gaze
falls on my shoulders, pulls me down
the way I’d later go, into the river,
trench coat packed with flatirons.
The lines reference the suicide of Virginia Woolf and suggest that the narrator plans to end her life in a similar fashion, or at least that she has fantasies of doing so. Rather than healing, the passing of time seems to be bringing further difficulty and mental anguish. It is a common misconception that time itself is an agent of healing.
But the notion that time heals carries an anesthetic and paralytic effect that is perfect for suburbia. (I’m a fan of the suburbs. Many people require sprawling spaces to develop into full human beings, to explore their inner psyches, spirituality, and humanity; however, many also succumb to the lack of culture and competitve edge in the suburbs.) In a poem called “Fireworks” — one of the most exciting social events in the suburbs—Altman comments on the banal life that is often referred to as “the real world.” She writes, “Whenever grownups / talk, it’s always about nothing / but always urgently important.” While this may be true, it is hardly unheard of. It recalls the poignancy of books like Revolutionary Road, but without the representative dialogue. In the sitcom King of Queens, Arthur Spooner (Jerry Stiller) characterizes the lassitude and monotony of suburban life. He asks his daughter if she is happy “schlepping coffee by day and folding giant underwear at night.” These humorous images produce more effective commentary than Altman’s bromides.
The speaker grows frustrated and ever-angrier at the isolation and sterility of her environment. She envies the intimate relationships of those around her. Poems like “Night Music” emanate a deep sense of desperation and lonlieness. The speaker of “Night Music” listens to her neighbors making love or having sex (it’s unclear which). In the last three lines of the poem, the speaker nearly becomes one with the experience: “I felt it as her tongue / passed across his bottom lip / and receded like a wave.” The lines are far too prosaic. But their banality is rivalled by that of “Back to School Shopping,” where wide-ruled notebooks and unsharpened pencils are the major players. The speaker waits for the bus with her peanut butter sandwich and leather satchel. She is waiting for a familiar sight: a yellow bus. It is yet another reminder that sometimes the unfamiliar is frightening, but that its urgency should not be ignored.
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