Empire's End by Peter Crowley

 

REVIEW BY KAREN KLEIN

The poems in Peter Crowley’s Empire’s End reflect the divided consciousness expressed in the difference between the image on the front cover and the image on the first page with the title. Pick up the book and face the stark guillotine, an image of execution most associated with the French Revolution, but also used by Nazi Germany. Crowley’s sharp social critique has the force of a blade while the next page’s image is that of a laughing Buddha, the logo of the publisher. The  Buddha’s geniality appears in the poems that involve the natural world, a place that contains both threat and consolation.

 

Filling out the implications of the cover image, the poem, Guillotine starts with a sarcastic tone, praising it as a fine instrument…it's sharp blade, an improvement upon/ the sword as it falls mechanically. That term indicates machine as opposed to human, presenting a negative view of the instrument. But this reviewer’s impression of sarcasm was short lived as the guillotine is praised for its ability to decapitate both rulers and ruled. The poet hypothesizes that it would be fine were it to be reinstated to deal with the swine..that causes steel rain to fall on people’s heads, whose spears are hurled at those who do not kneel. Crowley speculates it would be fine if those who/deliver mass death in the 21st Century knew of Louis XVI’s fate. The poet’s guillotine is a warning to those who rule now to remember that they too can be overthrown.

 

The poet’s fierce political and social critique, published in 2023, includes many poems written during Covid, a pandemic that involved societies in turbulent chaos.

Given this historical timing, the poems, for example Spring 2020, show the harms done and the pain caused not only by an industrial, oligarchic ruling class dominating the  ‘people’ but also by virus, attacking patients’ ability to breathe, forcing them into ventilators to survive, making the overworked doctors cry to themselves and the nurses go without N95 masks thus likely to contract corona. As in the poem, Worker Evolution, Crowley is a voice for workers and against abuses by those who control, in this case, the hospital owners. His plea for workers’  rights is evidenced in Train-- this machine to replace you with initial repetition on the stanzas: We bring you up/to bring you down. The “We” is personified by a 19th century railroad magnate who, in the poem The Lord’s Work, waves at The Lord who grinned back, giving a thumbs-up. Our systems of exploitation gets a heavenly permission.

 

Spring 2020 not only contains harsh social critique, but also introduces natural imagery in the pun on rabbit ears as the TV antennae and the animal. Crowley’s imagery ranges easily between our social world and nature’s world wherein the yellow bird sings:  /And how it sings/Yes, how it sings…. Repetition, often anaphora, for emphasis here and elsewhere is one of Crowley’s poetic devices to indicate urgency to awaken us, his readers/auditors, to the injustices about which the bird sings. Nature is given sentience to understand threat and to warn us and to feel pain as in the personification poem, Bird Injury. The bird speaks of its injured beak which he describes as a weapon which he used to stab a beetle before hitting a rock. This bird could stand-in for any violent human action that ricochets back. Maybe the violent get what they deserve, or ought to.

Sometimes, though, the non-human inhabitants get harmed. In Grass Cutting, another blade like that of the guillotine is the lawnmower’s ironically titled, civilized blade. Nevertheless…the ants below/look up in peril.

 

Contrasting the poems of social critique is Crowley’s strong sense of the importance of community; not the community of the oppressed workers, but of our neighbors and friends. In Shoveling, for example, the poetics of repetition give way to synecdoche:

Soft frigid white/makes rubber spin out/ and feet fall on their back/ Snow creates problems for car wheels and people slip and fall. The shovel itself is described as an enlarged prehistoric spoon. It has a blade, like the guillotine, but this blade doesn’t create harm or justice. It helps create community. When it stops biting into white pavement, conversation burgeons as the neighbors shoveling realize for a second/that we’re all in this together. Open mics, too, create community in a local hangout in Lynn, Massachusetts. The poet, probably one of the regulars, devotes a poem to describing many of the varied characters who come there to read, to make music. These regulars aren’t a generic class; they’re individuals.

 

Entering into community also can bring sadness as in the poem that references the disappearance and murder of a local young girl 23 years ago. After 3 years, her body was found; the murderer has never been found. In a stunning line, Crowley’s imagery unites her body, the natural surround, possibly locus of the murder, and the failure to find justice: The forest’s internal organs bleed an impenetrable silence.

 

In a book of urgent political critique and empathic descriptions of community, there are also deeply personal poems. Poems that speak of multiple travels, of a Bond wherein the speaker can rest my eyes on you/in the morning. And that is enough, or when it  isn’t And you still/ Break my heart. Poems about bodily frailties like illness and aging ,the awareness of the fear of the ultimate loss--the self….consumed by nothing’s screaming silence from the poem Dying.

 

The poem Coming to expresses awareness of the practice and burden of writing: Memories severed from language….Coming to something unformed, unknown, grasping more, slowly, and again not knowing. Grasping and unable to hold. The good poem offers advice: to know birth is an accident and life absurd and sees the act of writing poetry as transferring to paper the universal thousand-pound cinderblock weight. Perhaps the ability to show the truth of accident and absurdity makes a poem good. Crowley ends this challenging and rewarding collection of poems with a poem that unites Human Being who: 

Like lioness, lady slipper, elephant and redwood/You will do what you need/To survive/ Like all of us.

 

Karen Klein, author of This Close(Ibbetson Press); Associate Professor Emerita, Brandeis

University