by Nicole Terez Dutton
Pitt Poetry Series
University of Pittsburgh Press
copyright 2012
75 pages
Review by Lo Galluccio
Not since I first came across Lucy
Brock-Broido's “The Hunger,” has a poetry collection excited and
challenged me as much as “If One of Us Should Fall,” Dutton's
debut. In “The Hunger” Brock-Broido takes on the persona of
different characters: baby Jessica who fell down the well years ago,
a child in the cult group MOVE in Philadelphia and creates an idiom
for each of them. At other times she writes with a plethora of
images that are at times baroque, but each poem holds its own based
on the character and the situation. This is different from Dutton's
equally brilliant work. When a writer invents a new syntax and
manages to keep a unified voice amidst different poems, it is always
a fascinating achievement.
Whatever preconceived notions I had
based on the title –that she was posing a moral question and would
she, in fact, answer it? – vanished as soon as I plunged into the
first poem, which like a bookend, is mirrored at the end of the work:
Girl#1 and Girl #2. We are met with
“clear, coal-hot squares of disco”
and “a Dopple” and an ending “like horses,” It is a poem
with one declaratory sentence: “Listen, I am girl,” thus
signifying herself in a general category of people, but specifying
that she is indeed girl, female. Horses serve as an emblematic
force throughout this work – and they seem to represent something
American, some kind of independent motion, a grace of mobility and
speed. We are dealing in some measure with a language poet, one more
interested in playing with juxtapositions of images and objects, than
in their literal meaning in a typical narrative poem. However Dutton
does write in the first person quite often and in an abstract way,
tells a story of place or relationship or disposition including the
weather and the objects that together stitched form the vibe and
ambiance of each episode. She is almost always traveling somewhere,
to Austin, to Ohio, in an airport. It is a book about coming and
going and how to signify what happens in between those poles. Dutton
does pen some prose-poems in this work but all her poetry has
velocity, mystery and concrete sensuality, as in:
“And guitars burning us up, quick,
as malaria, strapped into the hind
bucket
of second hand Buicks, speeding
away, always, and always dumbstruck
by the drums trundled in our bones
the whole interstate home.”
p. 4 “Every Answer is Yes.”
These poems give us a sense of motion,
take us from one place to another through unlikely brash metaphors
that often tantalize.
In “Playing the Room” Dutton
writes about the aftermath of a show or event of some kind. We seem
to be in a bar. But her sense of the context is wild associations
that transmute from one thing
to something vastly different. Like a
good jazz improviser she takes us beyond the original key.
“behind the words,
the carcasses of steel mills
and rivers on fire. They try
to reassemble the logic the way
people interrogate suicide notes
cold trails that could lead
to the coordinates
where certain hearts lay
unspeaking buried
in the earth like gold.”
p.7
Her endings are always
satisfying,usually providing some kind of closure in the positive
vein
compared to the journey of the poem
itself. It seems she is always looking beyond the present moment,
through a crystal ball of language.
Traveling to Austin or to some other place along the interstate and
yet describing a state of mind or a strange association of verbs that
burst with action:
In Minor Key, she writes:
“Time swallows itself. We will
begin slow and tell the truth,
Tomorrow
a world, ten fingers less, will move
forward. There will be more
soldered wires, more chords and
flesh
held close with butterfly clamps”
p 14
Or, in Chaser, she takes the gerund
lying and gives it a series of unrelated descriptions, a whole new
story. It is a great poem, which ends with “shut up, shut up”
“Lying is many scavenger birds,
knees
beneath dinner tables
crossed and uncrossed, a virus
fortressed in blood and spit,
a name you do not speak,
feathers left in the mouth,”
p18
Like beautiful black and white
photographs, concrete objects are set against landscapes
and declarations and questions. In one
sense every poem is a missive describing where the author is and what
it may mean to you. Sometimes there's an episodic plot as in
“Holding Us This Away” which is interlaced with arresting
metaphors/similies, like:
“their clay ramshackles lining
the interstate like molars.”
p 11
The expansive vocabulary alone of
these pieces is impressive, their apposition and fine line of both
concrete identity and abstraction from their usual source. One would
deduce hat Dutton
has created a poetic travelogue of a
trip across America, but she never tells us that explicitly.. We
jump from Austin to Nashville to Ohio and no place is depicted in any
sort of predictable or stereotypical way. We are treated with the
inebriation of alcohol and music and road signs, yet the poems are
soberly constructed with a fine, if non-logical force. In “When
we get there we are Gone,” she writes:
“We can only sing razorblades over
the brim of Nashville.” and
“We know that language won't
survive past Ohio.”
There are so many finely crafted and
imaginative poems in this book it is difficult to pick out
the plums. The whole pudding is quite
delicious as a kind of celebration of language and an American
cultural experience. Both the titles and endings of her poems frame
each experience of reading them in a brilliant and suggestive way.
In “Many Kingdoms Toward You.” she begins with the image:
“The map in yesterday's suitcase, a
river
whose name dropped vowels and
feathers”
p. 45
referring back to the alphabet of a
common language combined somehow with the silky ephemera of the
object, feathers... and she ends with the bold declaration: “I
avalanche forward.” Such are the turns and twists Dutton takes in
the landscape of each piece.
The end of the book is mostly a
collection of prose-poems and experimental pieces that are almost
like Gertrude Steins list of objects and their qualities in such
striking poems (about gambling)
called “City of Candy-Colored Light”
or “Within these Squares of American Heaven” (about a tribal
bonding of friends moving through time zones,) or “Welcome Home”
(which celebrates “blackness” “with pulled-pork televisions,
““hammer shanks and cornrow,” and “Musicians, Mojomen”
“Mamis”)
This is a truly arresting book,
inspiring and highly original. I recommend it whole-heartedly. Or
catch Nicole Terez Dutton at a Boston or nearby venue. While I
haven't heard her read from this work, I'm sure it is a
lyrically-charged rendering of the many “razzle dazzle” poems
she's created. This book won the 2011 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and
Dutton studied poetry at Brown University and has won fellowships
from Cave Canem, the Fine Artswork Center in Provincetown and the
Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Lo Galluccio
Author of “Hot Rain,” “Sarasota
VII” and
“Terrible Baubles.”
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