Wee Hour Martyrdom by Jason Tandon

Reviewed by Erin McKnight

ISBN-10: 1934513059; ISBN-13: 978-1934513057
Sunnyoutside Press, 2008

Wee Hour Martyrdom is a showcase of accessible poetry. Yet the writing is also perceptive, reflective, and profound in the dignity it extends to the banal routines of existence. This is a collection I recommend to non-poetry readers who maintain their distance from the genre, whether due to a fear of ambiguity in meaning or disinterest in the elusive language of poetry—a language that seems always to snake away from hesitant eyes. Tandon’s articulation, even in the dreamlike worlds he crafts, is available and inviting, a device that feels simultaneously epiphanic and familiar.

The book is organized into three sections that include a total of 55 poems. Although a dreamlike mood permeates each section, a sense of reality that includes very tangible burdens and losses pervades the themes of the last section’s poems. This intrusion is readily apparent in “Weather Warning,” its visceral images startled by a notion of redemption that is impossible to carry into the waking world:

Rooftops sag with new snow.
The rotten oak in my tiny yard
Slants further.
News threatens
Overnight sleet.
Roads will close.

An empty sled
Slips down a hill,
Veers into the trees.

A frozen prayer
Breaks upon a stone.

It is certainly Tandon’s visual impressions that are most declarative in this collection, strongly apparent in poems like “Pink Eye,” in which the mundane is elevated to a plane wherein eloquence highlights even the most trivial of situations or occurrences:

What oozed between midnight and dawn
Has shut from me from view
With a crater of crust
Like I saw one summer in Utah.

And where Tandon’s language is at its most surprising is in the collection’s unyielding sense of perception, laid bare in the second stanza of “Pink Eye”:

That my other eye should be white as day,
Alert in its own way,
No tear for the other’s
Clear, contagious discharge.

Tandon’s remarkable ability is to to capture lives and situations just prior to the instant they are distinctly brought into focus. The effect is that of a distillation of every uninspired before moment, merging it into revelatory amplifications of normalcy, which sets the collection apart. As portrayed in “The Blue Jay,” Tandon’s characters are us; we share their experiences where the consequences boast an unconventionally comforting sense of isolation:

The blue jay
In my driveway
Does not move
As my car approaches.

With eyes closed
I back out.
A hovering exhaust
Becomes its sky

Perhaps what I admire most about Wee Hour Martyrdom is its ability to draw me in, time and again. Characters seem to lie in wait—not for initial discovery, but for the chance to reappear when life’s banalities seem to overwhelm my consciousness—to reaffirm that a spirit of dignity can combat any sense of insignificance related to my existence.

Erin McKnight is a Scottish writer now living in Dallas, and is Fiction Editor for Prick of the Spindle. Her writing has been widely published online and in print, in venues including flashquake, Ginosko Literary Journal, and PRECIPICe. Her short nonfiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and inclusion in W.W. Norton’s The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume 3. Erin holds an MFA in creative writing with a specialization in fiction, and is currently at work on an MA in literary linguistics.

© 2008 prickofthespindle.com