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Counting Bricks
Poems by Gary Metras
Dos Madres Press
Loveland, Ohio
120 Pages
$21.00
Review by Dennis Daly
Mnemonic sentiment, boiled down
to its essential, tear-charged elements, cannot be ignored. It drives human
nature. It mobilizes the emotions. It guides our unruly impulses toward
goodness. Poets who completely excise sentimentality from their art do so at
their own peril. Thankfully, Gary Metras is not one of those poets.
Metras, in his new poetry
collection, Counting Bricks, injects physical awe and unusual detail into the
ordinariness of passion and its rolling tides of melancholy and elation. His
precise, yet down-to-earth, verbiage contains and grounds any unseemly maudlin
excess.
The poet’s opening piece entitled
Splinter engages the peculiar bond between mother and child. He reduces the
extraction of an everyday splinter into a series of detailed components. Using
first his adult perception, then morphing into his child-memory, Metras nails
the moment. From the beginning of the procedure to its end, specifics trump
pain and fear (although both wait patiently in abeyance). Metras’ pre-teen protagonist concludes the
poem this way,
it will not do to cry. I watch
the needle
enter where the splinter entered.
The needle opens skin, probes
beneath
the straight, dark path, snags
it, lifts.
She does not take up tweezers.
She bends as if to kiss my
finger,
but closes her teeth on the
splinter,
draws it out, swipes it with the
ball
of her middle finger. We stare
at the tiny slice of the world
that yielded
such distress. I walk away
healing
and remember the pain.
As poor Gloucester in
Shakespeare’s King Lear laments, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.” Yes, the human condition accepts and to some
extent submits to chance and nature’s blind cruelty. In Metras’ poem, The Ants,
the poet paints these same boys at it again. This time with the help of lighter
fluid the youngsters destroy a multitude of unsuspecting ants devouring a candy
bar. Utter meanness or child’s play? The perpetrators of this massacre went on
to live their anonymous, albeit somewhat messy lives. Metras redirects despair
and all obvious bleakness, ending his poetic litany with an ironic flourish and
a bit of karma,
… Shy-Dickie went
into the Air Force and never came
back. Adelle, we think, is still
in jail
in Mexico. Jerry drives the
school bus
and his cute sister was pregnant
seven
times by five men.
Know-It-All-Stanley
sweeps the floors at
Merriam-Webster’s.
Susie is a nurse’s aide and a
mother and a
grandmother and seldom sees her
twin
brother. Holy-Roy retired from
the Post Office
and walks his neighbor’s dogs.
Billy B. has ex-wives and
inherited my father’s
worn bar stool at the Royal Café.
And one day
walking into the drugstore in my
53rd year,
I step on a can of lighter fluid
and
remember the smell of burning
ants.
Counting Bricks, the title poem
of this collection, dryly delivers its vital minutiae of clan history using the
medium of an old photograph. The picture, portrayed on the book’s cover,
includes the poet’s father and a host of his siblings. A family member had
found the photograph and scanned it. Now every few years it surfaces and
insists on being noticed and, with sentiment built in, remembered. As with most
large families (and this reviewer has some firsthand knowledge of that subject),
the odds and ends—marriages, pregnancies, poverty, drinking, union strikes,
births, deaths, poker games, and sadness are tallied together with moments of
fragile ardency. T.S. Eliot might call this associative device an objective
correlative. In any case, it does the trick of turning conflicting emotions
into a positive, even celebratory beauty. Consider this charged, detail-laden
stanza at the heart of Metras’ poem,
… I remember
counting bricks and piling them
as father built
a backyard barbecue for brother
number ten,
and mixing mortar for the block
foundation
of number eleven’s new house,
while we lived
through the noise of the
projects. I remember
holidays of whiskey-and-beer
breath stories
of war, Memorial Days of fading
photographs—
brothers in uniform, all in
combat—number
three a POW, these brothers
mentioned only once
or twice a year in voices charged
with pride,
then remorse, then silence,
then tears.
Pointedly, in a second person
poem entitled Making Pierogis, Metris conjures up a microcosm of labor and love
in a mother’s kitchen. Daily cooking routine and repetitive meal preparation
(meaning sore fingers and aching legs} merge with a doting mother and comforted,
now cooing daughter, distracted by spoons and cups and a magic white dot of
floury dough. Later the woman’s husband joins this hallowed scene. Everything
seems well with the world! It cannot change. The poet has placed his spell on
this composition. Metris conveys the wonder of it all in these lines,
The backs of your hands are
splotched
with tiny blisters from the
splash of boiling water
as you tossed into the pot raw
pierogis.
You rescue each one from drowning
and place them,
row upon neat row, in the glass
pan that shines
with anticipation. As they cool,
you clean.
When you lay the daughter in the
crib for a nap,
you whisper that one magic word, pierogis.
Women, at their best, civilize
all of us. Continuation and evolution of our species need the complexity of the
female touch. In Thanksgivings, Metris’ tight, celebratory poem lauding clan
continuation, mortality vies (or rather, combines) with genetics for spatial supremacy.
Mankind, blessed with a higher consciousness, rises to its ritual moment in
this very American holyday. The poet lovingly blesses his dual grandmothers in
the poem’s opening,
My grandmother, bless her DNA,
dead
When my mother was a child.
My fake grandmother, the real
one’s twin,
Bless her hugs, also dead many
years.
But I give thanks to both, one
for
birthing, one teaching my mother
to roast the perfect turkey, bake
the perfect pie crust, delicious
even three days afterward.
Whether you love or lament this
strange and affecting world that we live in, you’ll want to read this book and
marvel at Metras’ poetic particulars and well-placed particles of dry sentiment
and restrained passion. He’s genuine in his emotions and spot-on in his details.
