by Jeff Walt
Seven Kitchens Press, 2010
$7.00
Review by Susan Jo Russell
From a batch of chapbooks in which many poems struck me as either too expected or too obscure, Mr. Walt’s collection rose to the top, grabbing my attention with the first poem, “All Day I Have Been Afraid.” Afraid of what? Afraid, like we are now, not knowing of what we are afraid:
I heard Mrs. Lee scream Kill me! Kill me!
from inside her house and I did not move.
from inside her house and I did not move.
At noon, all the dogs in the neighborhood
began barking wildly. Was an unbearable truth
began barking wildly. Was an unbearable truth
told in a pitch only they could hear?
Opening a book with a title like Soot, the reader expects a certain amount of grit. And there is grit, for sure, in Walt’s rural, working class landscape. The people in these poems work at (and lose) dirty jobs in dirty places—strip mine, paper mill, greasy diner. They smoke, they drink, they take a joyride, hang out at the local bar or the porno shop, looking for camaraderie, eking out pleasure from the familiar and undemanding. In “The Wayside,” the cooks end their shift: “Before mopping up/the last soiled hour, someone always//pulled out a joint or two. Sitting on cases of Bud/out back, we smoked and bitched,//plotted to steal Delmonico steaks.”
I’m not a guy. I don’t (and haven’t) worked at these jobs or hung out swilling Bud Light. But Walt’s poems speak—to me, to anyone. While many of the poems are personal—about particular people in a sooty world of hard work, chronic exhaustion, few pleasures—they also capture the malaise of a society only rarely redeemed by love. Listen to how “The Wayside” ends: “each toke/like inhaling an ineffable love that we kept/passing around and around.” Yeah, we get that; whether a joint, a bottle of cheap wine, or even a pint of Häagen-Dazs, we’ve been there—the fleeting joy of the taste, the smell, the way we focus on that swallow of pleasure and let it blot out whatever we choose not to face.
There is a host of unseen and non-human presences in Walt’s world—angels, the dead—who lurk at the edge of vision; even the sidewalk and the fire hydrant have some kind of consciousness. They act as a sort of chorus. The dogs in these poems see more than most of the people do, like those dogs in “All Day I Have Been Afraid,” with their sense of something pervasive and wrong. In a later poem, a dog watches the soul of a suicide rise; in another, the dog can see the drunk angels who lounge in the shadows, avoiding their work as escorts for the dead. With their inability to imagine or desire a different life, they look at what the world is, while the humans blunt their senses against reality.
What do I read these poems for? Is it to confirm an inevitably grim view of a world in which even the angels have been pulled into its squalor? It can’t be only to commiserate about hopelessness. So then, what? It is to know these characters—and therefore myself—better. It is to walk with the author’s brother searching for an escaped dog he doesn’t even like because he must. It is to be reminded of the ways in which we create the easy camaraderies that substitute for deeper connections or don’t recognize the deeper connections that might be found in those comfortable niches where we’ve “become a regular.” It is to examine the varieties of dailiness in which we confront or avoid our deep fears. One of the poems in the book that haunts me is “Next,” in which the narrator searches in vain for something under the bed, finding mementoes of his past, but not able to remember what it is he is trying to find and why the need is so urgent: “A cockroach blinking back,//but I don’t have time to kill,/not today, not with this need to find/winding me like a toy.”
What Walt’s poetry illuminates is the insidiousness of despair—not only how it works in the lives of this man or that woman, but how the accumulation of despairing lives affects our perceptions of the world or, perhaps, not only perceptions, but the fabric of the world itself. Is the best we can do to remove ourselves from that world, if only temporarily? “I want to put the brakes on /my longing, fill my tub. Soak in my final stop. The world’s noise/and people who need me wrung from my body/like water squeezed out of a sponge.” [from “Bus Ride”]
Only the final poem gives a glimpse of love with a partner that—we shouldn’t be surprised—is not glamorized, not idyllic, not ecstatic, but, after all, what one can hope for: “My pulse against your back//reminds me how alive I am. Our exquisite/middle-aged bodies spooned, flawed, and used.”
I hope Walt is already working on his next collection.
