The Anabiosis Press, 2011
The Anabiosis Press Chapbook Contest Winner 2010
ISBN: 0-9727955-9-6
Saddle Stapled, unpaginated, $12
Ghost, by Gaylord Brewer, was the winner of the 2010 chapbook contest sponsored by The Anabiosis Press and perfectly embodies the definition of “anabiosis” as a “reanimation after apparent death” but in weird reverse. In these poems, a speaker addresses the ghost of himself, as if he is essentially dead, or as good as dead. Ghost is a being who is animate in him now and bringing him ever nearer actual death. It is life that is dubious here, “apparent,” but haunted by apparition. The poems are eerie, achingly honest, conversational, and beautifully, darkly funny.
Brewer puts his speaker in a particular setting and situation with an epigraph by Philip Levine from “Hear Me.” Here is part of it:
and I rise
and go downstairs to walk among
the bodies of lost men who have
come to die in Barcelona.
Indeed, the man and his double, Ghost, must journey to a small town outside Barcelona, to visit a bridge, a monastic tower, a bust of the Virgin Mary, and to die. Or to prolong for a time this living death. In the opening poem, “Becoming Ghost,” the man who addresses himself as Ghost senses the urgency, commanding “Fly, wraith…Fly to a moon-washed city / of dust and stone.” And follows his own command.
The dark humor begins right away, in the second poem, as “Ghost Considers a Dive from the Loft of his Monastic Chamber,” as if suicide were a possibility. It isn’t, not for a “ghoul” or Ghost. “Anyway, you’re joking around, / flirting with the rush.” With that line, I’m gripped—at the edge, high up, looking down, feeling that frisson. Brewer doesn’t care if he’s stating the obvious; he’s having fun! He can dare to say, in the loft poem, that he’ll “need a safe means of descent” after all, and, “Yes, one way or the other a leap of faith.”
Likewise, in “Ghost Takes the Evening Bus, Briefly Dozes,” he can take this modernized version of Emily Dickinson’s carriage from “[Because I could not stop for Death]” and push the conceit in the last stanza:
Next stop, perhaps one after,
that’s yours. Don’t worry—you’ll
surely know it when you see it.
These are not pretty poems. There is plenty of blood and bodily distress in his living death. Trimming toenails sends “a red tide…pooling across a map of tiles.” The pun “[t]hin-skinned indeed” sets up the skin’s reality: “A rotted parchment barely / containing the goo.” Ew.
But even if we are tempted to turn away from the rotting, breaking, bruised, and bleeding body, we are drawn in by the human need, the fragility, the nostalgia, the bittersweet longing of the speaker and his Ghost. I was terribly moved by the poem “Awaking from Nightmares, Ghost Hangs His Laundry,” in which the man wakes still caught in the horror and shame of his dreams, and turns for comfort to the mundane task of hanging his laundry, the socks in pairs, the “pants collapsed and amputated,” the “[e]mpty, reaching arms” of the shirts filling with air, the cloth a
gentle sail to all held and released,
insinuation of the body that was Ghost,
its terrors and longings—then nothing.
Who wouldn’t feel compassion for that empty man, that floating Ghost?
Kathleen Kirk is a writer whose work appears online and in print in Confrontation, Eclectica, Poetry East, Sweet, YB Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks Selected Roles, Broken Sonnets, and Living on the Earth, with Nocturnes forthcoming this winter from Hyacinth Girl Press. A past editor and reviewer for RHINO, Kirk is poetry editor for Escape Into Life. She blogs about poetry, reading, and life eight days a week at Wait! I Have a Blog?!
