Tom Dvorske
REVIEW
Austin Hummell. Poppy. Del Sol Press.
Austin Hummell’s second full collection of poems opens with an epigraph from the final stanza of Sylvia Plath’s “Poppies in October”:
O my God, what am I That these late mouths should cry open In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.
Plath’s presence in Poppy extends beyond just the neat connection between poppies and heroin. In fact, throughout much of Poppy, echoes of Plath’s Ariel are not so much heard as felt vibrating through the veins of each line. However, these clean poems of an even cleaner poet draw a close and stark contrast to the Plath of Ariel. Both poets begin with a recognition that weds childhood’s unconscious fears with their adult manifestations, draped in mythical experience:
In the night woods, any stir is sudden— A syrinx fallen to leaves, the shuffle of a goat’s foot, the sound of your own voice
startling the silence a capella. Even kids own the awe of a god there, ruminant in cover, redolent of sweat. (“Panic”)
This new fear, panic, named for the god and the “alarm it caused us” recurs “when halfway through life”
the swirl of blue lights and sirens shocks us
to the icy shoulder of an alien road, when the plane we’re in dips and pivots in a pocket of wind, when the phone at 3 am
flushes sweat into the cradle of our palm— that the woods are still alive, deserted
by parents, that no forest is so black as the one we wake to, children still.
“Panic,” a rather disinterested poem given its title, is a sobering conclusion to the first section of the book that sits us in the midst of various drug-induced, desire-laden panics. The poem’s last words signal the next two sections, which take us through the dumb and vicious wonder of childhood fancy, perhaps best explained by the poem Equus, which recalls Peter Schaffer’s nightmarish play about a boy who, for no discernible reason, blinds six horses with a metal spike. Hummell’s “Equus,” however, takes an alternative route where the metal spike is a tongue stud and “the last place his parents would look,” blinding not the vision, but impairing the ability to speak it. And this is one of the places where Hummell and Plath diverge.
The tenor of Hummell’s “Equus” recalls Plath’s poem “Cut” where the severed thumb induces a sort of panic then becomes an object of ridicule. For Hummell, however, the experience of language itself becomes both a source of panic and an opening, “the ocean’s ear. / And she opens like an ear to a question / or like a question to the sea’s / redundant thunder and spray.” These lines from “The Hand of Beatrice,” who resembles not so much the methadone as the female nurse, calls the speaker into the mouth of Beatrice, into the mouth of the ocean, echoing the final line of the book’s first poem: “The World? Fuck. I can’t get enough of it.” For Plath, words are “dry and riderless”:
While From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars Govern a life. (“Words” from Ariel)
In short, Hummell comes down on the side of embracing the world, the word, even if the nouns have deserted and the speech is impaired.
Finally, in most startling contrast, Hummell shares Plath’s reinvention of myth and folktale. For Hummell these myths come in the form of Columbo, Charlie Chan, Michael Jordan, and Father Brown, to name a few. The Hollywood sideshow that takes center stage in the book, occupied mostly with its unassuming detectives, salutes the book’s central issue—life’s mysteries, bracketed by the even more mysterious image of the Poppy: at once dangerous as it is beautiful, a kind of Kim Novak figure, “a really good faker,” but one, like these poems, that you definitely can’t get enough of (“Lavender”).
|
|