Concrete Wolf, 2010
Concrete Wolf Poetry Chapbook Award Winner 2009
ISBN 978-0-9797137-4-3
perfect bound, 33 pages, $10
Four of a Kind is a book of marvelous precision and mysterious distortion; reading it is sometimes like looking through squeaky-clean plate glass, sometimes through the wavy glass of old farmhouse windows. Indeed, each poem is arranged as a window with four panes, with the vertical and horizontal white space between stanzas serving as the muntins, or glazing bars, separating and supporting the panes.
I found myself reading down the left side and then up, across, and down the right side of the page on the first read, as I might in any book, but, since each re-reading of a poem might be clockwise, counterclockwise, or diagonal, each poem has the ability to reflect in multiple ways, almost like a prism. A diagonal re-read was particularly helpful with the labyrinth/maze images in “Four Threads.”
Some of the poems have epigraphs. In “Four Threads,” Sherlock Holmes is quoted as saying, “We hold several threads in our hands, and the odds are that one or the other of them guides us to the truth.” I was, of course, seeking the truth, and a way out of the maze, in that poem. It begins, “My fingers shook as I tied thread around a giant hinge.” Diagonally down the page, the last stanza begins, “Exiting the maze was a wild hurry.” There is a fire-haired woman in these two stanzas, a woman who might be trouble in another; “liquor-soaked fruit” in one, “a keg of beer” in another; but, taken together, the four stanzas have the feel of a man seeking to understand the confusing, recurring dream of waking life. “But this hum is a howling—black and garbled, lit with phosphorus.” When he gets out of the maze, he seems no better off. “Afterwards I felt relief, but no elation.” And, though he probably won’t give up the search for the truth, “I had no thread left to follow but the wind.”
There are lots of threads to follow in Four of a Kind. First there is the poker hand of the title, suggesting a really good hand, but one that can be beaten, reminding us of the supremacy of luck in games of chance or skill. The highly-structured poems themselves are a game of skill. Each poem is titled “Four [Something],” part of the book’s precision.
The opening poem, “Four Mirrors,” invites us to consider or join the speaker, looking in or looking out of “windows” that serve as literal or metaphorical mirrors, or at other reflective surfaces. Stanza one appears to be looking out a windshield during a traffic jam. The top right and bottom left “mirrors” appear to be television screens—a news station and Food TV—thus, mirrors of the culture. And not all reflective surfaces do reflect: “My coffee is no crystal lake, thank God, where I can see my face. I take it muddy, with huge spoonfuls of amnesia.”
This stanza introduces awful images from car accidents that haunt the speaker: “At night I stumble through dream wrecks, wrenching glass and metal from beloved bodies.” These images come back inside more narrative in “Four Accidents,” reminding us of the bad luck possible in the book title but also reaching out with vast empathy into the neighborhood and the universe.
“Four Blues” gives us visual art (alluding to Picasso’s blue period), blues music, “the walking blues” of a wayfaring family man, and a sad state of mind as common as puckered wallpaper in a bathroom. Somehow the images call to each other across stanzas, pulling it all together. I keep calling the separate squares of the window panes “stanzas,” but these poems also work as prose poems, formally and at that surreal and subjective level.
This is strongly evident in “Four Dreams,” which recounts sometimes horrific dream images with the same steady voice of the other poems, and, by now, we know details of his daily life and his growing up, such as a mouse under the floorboards, so the dreams might be our own. “When skyscrapers start shooting up around me, I don’t need Freud to know I better come to before the shit gets freaky. Heavens, wild trees! Oh where is that naughty mouse who wakes me up?”
I was particularly drawn to “Four Names,” which begins, “My name’s a scar, an indication, a beacon for travelers and a con man’s match.” Indeed, the poet’s name is Mark! The poet’s wife’s name, Jill, is pursued, transforming this to a poem of direct address: “Your name, being youthful, went up the hill with Jack and fell all to the ground with him you doxy!....Your name is excellent, easiest of all to spell.” The playfulness of this one reminds me of Anglo-Saxon riddle poems, where we read for clues that reveal the objects and routines of our everyday lives.
Looking further, I can see how the muntins in these window poems may re-create the heavy caesura of traditional Anglo-Saxon poetry vertically now as well as horizontally, and visually as well as aurally, with images and language play replacing the alliteration of that older form. I might be looking too hard at a dusty window with this comparison, but I do notice now how the white space of the muntins, in the shape of a cross, might be seen as a “mark” by way of negative space, yet another subtle play on the poet’s name.
I embraced the challenge of reading these poems as precise and as varied as hand-blown glass ornaments, so I was disappointed to encounter an outright error in the last one, “Four Furies,” and in a wonderful line: “I’m crass, like my friend who’s [sic] wife had a two-year affair with the bedroom wall.” Of course, it should be “whose,” the possessive, not “who’s,” a contraction, and this kind of thing always disconcerts me in a fine book of poems. The editor or proofreader should catch and should certainly not introduce such an error, but maybe we can consider it an annoying imperfection in that old wavy glass or a “mark” from the glassblower’s pipe. It does not mar the final image of the furies who “giggle and scrap like girls at the back of a bus. Child, child, child they chant, as we drive through fields of violent light.” I hear them even now, and I see the scary light.
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?!
