Partner, Orchard, Day Moon
By
Michael Todd Steffen
Cervena
Barva Press
Somerville,
MA
ISBN:
978-0-9883713-2-3
Cover
Art: Irene Koronas
61
Pages
Review
by Dennis Daly
Poetry
needs concentration. Reading Michael Todd Steffen’s first collection of poems,
Partner, Orchard, Day Moon, demands both presence of mind and a steady
emotional containment. I kept putting the book down and looking behind me.
Footfalls I thought. Perhaps murmurings. Or a pulse in the back of my neck.
Many
of Steffens pieces conjure up small town and rural Americana: holidays,
hunting, board games, table talk, hand-me-downs, views through kitchen windows,
summer adventures, and, of course, baseball. Strangely, the atmospherics that
saturate this collection suggest Igmar Bergman rather than Norman Rockwell. In
the midst of measured well-wrought lines and enticing music, something wicked
this way comes.
Right
from the book’s first poem Steffens has a way of disorientating. In Christmas
in August the poet sets up a juxtaposition of seasonal discomfort. The piece’s
second person protagonist ascends a department store’s escalator in summer garb
into a thinner, much colder mannequin world. To drive his image home the poet
places a mirror beyond the escalator’s railing. The contrast tests reality. The
poem opens this way,
Wandering
lost through the department stores
You
catch a glimpse of yourself in an odd
Mirror
gliding over the escalator’s
Handrest—when
the metal step slips forward
And
you stumble, up walking around the mannequins
Clad
for autumn in pullovers and cords.
Summer
hasn’t ended.
The
understated rhyme and metrics seem to effectively push a chilling definition of
the ambiguous, later-mentioned ”bag people” front and center.
Moody
silence pervades the intelligible, but demonic, chess game of life in one of
the title poems (there are three) called The Partner. Curiously, Steffen drops
the names of two iconic chess grandmasters into this context: Tigran Petrosian,
noted for his remarkable, if interminable draws, and Gedeon Barcza, who played
offense using a defensive strategy. The poem ends in Bergman- like fashion,
Thickening
in the waking winter dark
And
the checker’d go watery beneath the pieces—
Your
knight in stirrups at the toe of his pawn.
You’d
catch yourself up from a nod and swear
He
had left the room. But he kept murmuring at you.
All
the while he sat right there
Across
the table, not saying a word.
Steffen’s
sonnet Thanksgiving becomes a secular or possibly a quasi- religious rite of
guilt and sacrifice in a hushed ceremony of food and family. Words such as
“accused,” “wince,” “pain,” and “hushed” shadow the meal and, perhaps,
foreshadow other troubles. The poem ends ambiguously. The poet says,
One
creature went silent. He went on to live
And
join the toast at the table with its ornaments
For
the holiday, the straw weft cornucopia
Basket
with squash and gourds and native corn,
Auburn
of oat sheaf in the candle’s aura
Hushed
for the dishes my aunt told us to pass
With
sneaky dribs of red wine for my glass.
Another
title poem, The Orchard, Steffen molds into a beautifully compressed piece that
mulls over the phenomena of appearance and promise. His braille metaphor really
hits the mark. Here are the first eight lines,
Trees
stood all winter like cattle in the field
Naked
of their leaves in wind and snow,
Their
extremities advanced like blind men reading
Braille
from the lines of wind that made them tremble.
To
look at them for long you would remember
How
superficial winter’s hardest freeze
Compared
to their roots deep as the cemetery’s
Shelter
where uncles seasoned herring stew.
My
favorite Steffen poem, The Miracle Worker in Work Clothes, pushes through the
fertile clods of page prophesizing the brutish theology of a barnyard universe.
The piece is mythic and absolutely unforgettable. The nitty-gritty of creation
accusingly grabs civilized man by his white-collared throat, and demands that he
collect his illusions and step aside. The poet says,
With
the creases of leather boots clumped in clay
The
miracle worker
Has
raised the dead at Saint Galen’s
While
the family wept and praised the lord their god.
Like
earth stunning
Winter
back into spring, the miracle worker
Tensed,
a body of sweat and breath, breast borne open
To
the holy spirit
With
great concentration pushing, pushing
The
dead back into this life while men
Looking
on stood dumb…
Hand
Me Downs, a sonnet, begins as a meditation of family closeness and work ethic,
evolves into the nature of memory, and ends lightly, yet troublingly,
considering mankind’s shared condition. Steffen explains,
I
was straw for style. Others were remembered.
Beyond
their season things withstood a year
Stretched
to casual, wear tear, raggedy,
Nearly
familiar, for me or anybody.
The
longest poem in this collection Steffen entitles Ghost Man. Reminiscent of
Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Steffen’s persona gathers about him a
ghost companion, a dead man pursuing him in his imagination. One of a bunch of
summertime kids, the poet’s protagonist had come face to face with the dead man,
formerly a hanged man. Sickened by what he saw he ran away with his friends in
search of adults. Later, the unresolved death of this ghost (suicide or
homicide?) gives him power over the poet’s imagination. This indefatigable and
hostile spirit blocks pathways and bridges and pursues the poet, threatening
violence. He becomes the sum of all fears. The paranoia builds in these lines,
Some
days later, he’s be there again
Barring
my passage to the pathway bridge.
For
hours after I’d given up and turned
Away
from that crossing with its graceful camber
Over
the river, he followed me
In
silence, appearing behind a large stone
Or
from a hedge or through a row of trees—
The
knotted hunch over to one shoulder
Sure
sign that he had no fear and would eat anything
Steffen’s
collection of poetry does not have the feel of a first book with its expected
missteps and questionable choices. On the contrary its unmistakable artistry
and mysterious combination of maturity and controlled paranoia belies that
trite canard. There is real power, both mythic and otherwise, in Steffen’s word
images delivered here. The bright future of this ghost-haunted, highly talented
poet seems beyond question.
Wonderfully focussed review, Dennis. And Michael, I much look forward to reading your book.
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