Author Archives: Halubschock

Review of Testament by Luke Hankins

Luke Hankins. Testament. Texas Review Press, 2023. 21 pgs. $16.95.

Testament, this small collection by Luke Hankins, his third, accomplishes what chapbooks can do so well—thematically the poems are closely enough linked to warrant publishing them together like this rather than as a portion of a larger collection, and each poem is strong, making the collection feel weightier than the Table of Contents’ list of fifteen (often short) poems might suggest. Several of the poems are clearly set in 21st century America, not so much because they refer to specific events as because they are infused with a constant awareness of violence, especially gun violence. Others, though, recall grace and tenderness so that as much as we might be tempted by despair, the poems urge us gently, gently, toward hope.

Here is the opening poem, “Category Error,” in its entirety:

Hummingbirds are fighting
over the flowers in the garden again,
because beauty doesn’t make anything
immune to cruelty.

Imagine a world in which each
beautiful creature could be trusted—
and isn’t each creature beautiful?

The sleek, streaked coat of the tiger.
The iridescent scales of the snake.
The shockingly blue eyes
of the shooter on the evening news.

The last line is so memorable in part because it’s so unexpected. Until this point, the poem has seemed to be about the cruelty of what we call nature, the categories we’ve created to position creatures as “predator” or “prey,” creatures red in tooth and claw as they struggle against others for survival. Yet if we reread the poem, we can see that each line prepares us for the last, so that after we finish reading, the last line has acquired that sense of inevitability that characterizes so many good poems.

As is true with so many of the poems in this collection, Hankins’ effective but subtle craft choices contribute to the poem’s thematic resonance. The first two lines are about as syntactically straightforward—subject, verb, prepositional phrases—as a sentence in English can get. While the words “Hummingbirds” and “flowers” might seem conventionally, even stereotypically, poetic, the syntax, typical of fact-based objective writing, challenges any expectation that this poem will proceed according to Romantic interpretations of nature. Although the next several lines become more abstract, the meaning avoids becoming vague, partly because the language retains some concrete reference, e.g. “beautiful creature,” even in the midst of abstraction. In stanza two, the speaker is asking a real question—readers might be initially tempted to respond “of course,” but then think, “well, wait a minute” before they return to the affirmative. Finally, in stanza three, we return to concrete and specific examples, the “tiger” and “snake” perfectly representative of creatures that both fascinate and threaten. At the description “shockingly blue eyes,” some readers’ imaginations might drift toward the human, though others likely envision white tigers or other domesticated animals. Even those who think “human” here, however, are unlikely to anticipate that final line.

The final stanza is particularly musical. Hankins incorporates nearly every sonic device aside from end rhyme. There’s an abundance of alliteration: “sleek, streaked…scales…snake” and “shockingly…shooter.” There’s lots of assonance: “sleek, streaked” and “scales…snake” and “blue…shooter…news.” “Sleek” and “streaked” also form an internal rhyme. This music is exceptionally attractive, even as the content becomes much less comfortable.

This poem is not written to comfort readers, nor to reassure us that all, in the words of Julian of Norwich, will be well. Indeed, all might not be well, and readers are left to answer for themselves the poem’s central question: how can a creature who is a murderer, perhaps a mass murderer, perhaps a mass murderer of children, nevertheless be “beautiful”? “Category Error” is an ideal poem to open this collection, for it represents Hankins’ style as well as the understated tone and probing content of many of the other poems.

The title poem, “Testament,” is more personal; that is, the first-person speaker seems to be speaking of his own experience. It begins with a bit of linguistic delight: “I haven’t lived terribly well– / but I probably haven’t lived terribly, either.” In this, he resembles most of us. He has suffered defeat and despair, described as a “night-gilded chariot,” a type of vehicle driven by another who might have absolutely no concern for him. Nevertheless, he has also “just as surely fallen at the hands / of beauty, plain delight—utter / / surrender.” He is a human being caught in the throes of the human condition. This poem is exceptionally controlled, and at thirteen short lines exactly as long as it needs to be. Its language is tight, and the stanzas, all either one or two lines, contribute to its clean appearance on the page. Despite its content, in other words, its exploration of extreme emotional states, the poem itself is meditative.

Many of the poems in Testament are equally meditative. They vary widely in form, however. Hankins seems equally comfortable writing a villanelle or prose poem as he is writing free verse—and even the free verse poems explore form differently from one another. It doesn’t seem fair to say I wish such a carefully constructed book were longer, so I won’t say that. Instead, I’ll say that we should all be looking forward to the poems Hankins will publish next.

 

Cover image of bookLisa Fay Coutley, ed. In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy. Black Lawrence Press, 2023. 403 pgs. $29.95.

Lisa Fay Coutley has done a masterful job editing this new ambitious anthology of poems responding to grief. As every reader knows, grief is always complicated—because our feelings about the deceased are often complicated and because every death, as Hopkins so eloquently articulates, reminds us of our own mortality. The poems in In the Tempered Dark acknowledge the range of responses individuals experience, for let’s face it, not everyone who dies is a “loved one,” and even loved ones aren’t always loved absolutely or absolutely all the time.

And sometimes people or things are gone without being dead. Grief is accompanied by frustration, relief, guilt, despair, anger, bewilderment. So the poems here are more honest than many eulogies, but the anthology succeeds not only because of its variety of content. Stylistically, the poems are also diverse, which makes turning the page refreshing and often surprising. The range of voices confirms that this is an anthology, not simply a group of poems that could have been written by the same person. In addition, in a unique feature, each contributor has written a prose accompaniment to their poems, providing context for the content or thoughts on composition.

Contributors include poets who are far along in their careers and already well known—Diane Seuss, Janet Burroway, Ilya Kaminsky—younger poets who have published one or two or three collections—W. Todd Kaneko, Malachi Black, Meg Day—as well as poets who will be new to many readers. This makes it challenging to cite just a few, but it also means that readers of the book will be richly rewarded regardless of how many reviews they’ve read. Rather than focus on one or two representative poems to examine in detail, as I generally do with single-author collections, I’ll comment briefly on several.

Composed on couplets, Rebecca Aranson’s “Star Dust” initially looks spare, with its regularity and frequent space breaks between stanzas. It seems to begin in media res: “And then somehow a slipping away, as if wanting no one to linger with you / at the door making plans for next time. You had come without a coat…” Readers quickly understand the circumstances. The deceased was likely elderly, the speaker’s father, living in a nursing home where the speaker’s mother also resides. The death seems to have been one many of us hope for, “a slipping away” after a long life. This knowledge, however, does not mitigate the grief of the survivors, nor does it do much to soften our knowledge of our human condition. In its last section, the poem brings the reader into its circumstances by extending outward. Here are its final lines:

Grief is in you from the start and in you at the end
and though sometimes your days are flooded with it,

and sometimes your days are clear, we are made of it
as much as we are made of the ruins

of the first flaming star, whose far flung dust still spins
us into being.

Aronson here complicates that uplifting cliché, that we are made of stardust, revealing a deeper and more complete truth.

Victoria Chang’s prose poem “The Clock” also explores the speaker’s father’s situation. Though alive, he’s experiencing dementia, an inability to think abstractly that Chang initially explores through the symbolism of an analog clock face. Interpreting it is more complicated than we often realize, with the numbers each standing for more than one idea—seconds, minutes,  hours. About two-thirds of the way through the poem, she introduces another metaphor, leading to her conclusion:

If you unfold an origami swan, and flatten the paper, is the paper sad because it has                      seen the shape of the swan or does it aspire towards flatness, a life without creases?                    My father is the paper. He remembers the swan but can’t name it. He no longer knows the          paper swan represents an animal swan. His brain is the water the animal swan once swam          in, holds everything, but when thawed, all the fish disappear. Most of the words we say                have something to do with fish. And when they’re gone, they’re gone.

What does it mean to remember without access to words? Each of the metaphors in this poem reveals something about the nature of human thought, our ability to understand one thing as another, to see a piece of paper and recall an animal, even an animal we might never have seen, to see a numeral and know that it signifies both a word and a concept. For readers and writers, this knowledge that words disappear can be particularly disturbing, even as we savor the image of a folded piece of paper and its representation of an elegant creature.

Several poems in this anthology grieve the non-human, including Jenny Dasre-Orafai’s “We Lost Three Billion Birds in Forty-Nine Years.” The speaker attempts to visualize the three billion, a number that is, if not literally uncountable, nevertheless unimaginable. The poem explores some of the other absences that follow, as well as the possibilities the birds’ absence ironically provide. The concluding lines are particularly suggestive: “We’ve got so much food in the feeder and / the other animals can’t get their fill.” The other animals—perhaps squirrels or chipmunks or skunks, perhaps ourselves. These lines articulate a call to conscience for human beings whose insatiable appetites have created this crisis of climate change and extinction.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s “They were armed with long guns” is one of the most stylistically unusual poems as well as one of the most overtly political in the anthology. It is arranged into ten sections, beginning with a single-line opening: “and that’s how everyone they shot, died.” We know immediately that this poem will address gun violence in America. Three of the sections are titled “I, Rearrangement Servant” and consist of words composed of letters contained in the title, for example “Where were you last night? / Sheltering // in the theater…” and “it is early to be dying.” Three of the sections begin with the line, “I fear for my life at the following places (circle all that apply)” and contain options like “Shopping Malls,” “Parties,” and “Landmarks.” The third of these sections, however, contains only one word repeated twelve times: “School.” Two of the sections are more conventionally poetic in their appearance. In one, the speaker is leading a class discussion on a poem describing murder. In the final section, the speaker describes a “dollbaby” belonging to a friend’s son, a doll named Pete that shoots bullets out of its hand and feet. This toy that should provide comfort instead introduces the child to that most American characteristic: a gun. “They were armed with long guns” is conceptually ambitious and memorable in its execution.

All of the poems in this book merit extended discussion. Lisa Fay Coutley has thoughtfully edited In the Tempered Dark, selecting poems that complement each other in form as well as content, and choosing  poems that also succeed individually in terms of craft. The range of the poems taken as a whole and the accomplishment of each one create a gratifying reading experience.