Cinders of My Better Angels by Michael Magee. MoonPath Press, 2011. 51 pages.
Review by P. Nelson.
While not all the poems in Michael Magee’s ‘Cinders on My Better Angels” chronicle his explorations of medicine (or medicine’s of him), the many that do are notable. Americans of this era, we may not fully appreciate the clinical oddity of top forty radio infused treatment rooms or the off hand discourtesy of painful diagnostics that Magee has experienced up close and very personal; in Shakespearean terms—he has drunk the spider-or at least the banana flavored barium. That’s almost a Magee type jest but he has risen the stakes of his play and his jokes are better. But it’s what happens with poetry of distinctive utterance; the reader begins to mimic the poem’s performative gestures. Of course poetry can be distinctively good or bad (only the banal is oblivious), so let’s be clear – Magee’s is good.
While not all the poems in Michael Magee’s ‘Cinders on My Better Angels” chronicle his explorations of medicine (or medicine’s of him), the many that do are notable. Americans of this era, we may not fully appreciate the clinical oddity of top forty radio infused treatment rooms or the off hand discourtesy of painful diagnostics that Magee has experienced up close and very personal; in Shakespearean terms—he has drunk the spider-or at least the banana flavored barium. That’s almost a Magee type jest but he has risen the stakes of his play and his jokes are better. But it’s what happens with poetry of distinctive utterance; the reader begins to mimic the poem’s performative gestures. Of course poetry can be distinctively good or bad (only the banal is oblivious), so let’s be clear – Magee’s is good.
My Sigmoidoscopy wasn’t that flexible./ I tensed up as the snake went in… / what were they looking for anyway?/ Hidden canals in Venice? / As they discussed me like gondoliers taking tourists for a ride-decked out / in another language of jargon. (from My Flexible Sigmund Freudoscopy)
“Language of jargon” is suggestive and artful. And the whiff of Venice, as even a tourist as delicate as Henry James might agree in a closeted moment, wholly appropriate ; La Serenissima, golden flecked, serpentine, glisteningly intestine, with its hints of the fetid and fecal. And something apt too about those gimlet-eyed, almost cynical medical gondolierists who have Charoned too many over the familiar crossing.
Magee’s manner at its best is “American” at its best : informal, funny, fundamentally modest, conversational, riffing; ragtimeingly intelligent, alert, capacious. It knows how to envelope his sharp edge subject-objects, needles, endoscopes, tumors, rasorial nurses. She says something about a home visit/which sounds like a death sentence/but maybe I’m reading into someone /else’s life, besides for right now / I get my twenty dollar co-pay back. (from Lab Results)
It would be easy to glide over the not calling attention to themselves subtleties, a death sentence read, a reimbursement that is actuarially temporary.
People here today look lost. “I don’t /care as long as they don’t operate on me,”/ someone says. The lobby is under construction / and no one can get through. The deli is under / the jackhammer’s rule as people spin off / in different directions. It’s Friday and we’ll / soon be keeping each other company …/ The unemployed, SSI, charity cases and elderly / we are all here on life support, waiting / for hip replacements, or cataract surgery / and no one is admitting to anything.” (from Admitting)
Our minds are parliaments (or medical grand rounds) and sure there is some party that will earnestly assert that the chief value of this poetry is as courageous and often humorous (which is, in this context, a re-iteration of “courageous”) testimony.
But the opposition would be as right to counter we don’t care about another such testimonial ; talk to your local oncologist or veterinarian; uncommon courage is a common virtue. And for all we know or really care , Michael Magee is actually a tri athletetic pre-med student with a serious case of writer’s itch. Our concern and Time’s is the vitality of the body of words, a corpus sufficient unto itself, its health a matter of images, rhetorical and verbal musculatures. Our project has nothing to do with “the ghost in the machine”, an author somewhere charting his course along the Seven Ages. Are some of Maggee’s enjambments detached? A few of his adjectival phrases loose or thematics too rue-mantic? Should they be looked to? Yet every poem in Cinders of My Better Angels gives pleasure as art, communicates qualities of courage, wit, observancy. So we do care. Stay well Magee, for your next book.
