Amaranth
by Robert Carr
published by Indolent Books
Review by Alice Weiss
These poems are
rhythmic , unabashedly erotic, in the broader sense of Eros, love of
body, its joys and breakdowns, unabashedly homoerotic. The
populations of Robert Carr’s sensibility cluster in dramatic
stretches. They include the “Clay” of his childhood, a
molester, an abandonment, and the earth from which he blooms,
muscular and wounded. Those who hurt and those who nurture: the
difference is almost invisible. Love in “Porch in a Storm” is
blood-lipped,
standing flame,
fast wood with
tearing eyes
we burn in a forest
of distant
beating hands.
Collapsed
in our sorries, on
the floor
beneath his weight,
I understand
why he cries and
licks
my familiar salt.
In “Milk Bath,” where the speaker
is no longer on “location” when a former lover dies, finds
“Behind the desk drawer pull . . . our rings. . . .
Relieved I’m not
there to see your body
I run a scalding water in the tub.
The velvet ring box is open on the
sink,
bath salts turn a steam to milk.
Once again, a slippery knuckle refuses
your band as I lower myself into a
burn.
The vivid sensual imagery in these
lines, coupled with the grinding honesty of the speaker and the way
the physical images carry the emotional weight is characteristic as
is the accurate tradeoff of relief and scalding.
The organizing metaphor, starkly
intellectual amidst all the sensuality, is the Amaranth, the flower
of the title. The book isdivided into three sections, each named for
a particular species of Amaranth: Prince’s Feather, Goosefoot,
Wormseed. The three species all contain healing, nutritious, and
poisonous properties. The term Amaranth itself comes from a Greek
word meaning unfading, or undying. and indeed memories of boyhood and
family appear here, sometimes poisonous (as in Clay”) and sometimes
healing. Even funny, unfadingly funny, as in “Before you,” which
begins, “there was a youth/he jerked off. . .” and goes on in a
long phallic shape, but charmingly.
Throughout the poems there are moments
that stop you with their wit;
in Hawk, a hawk, “cocky/ as a bar
stool drunk/ with a bowie,” a “Valentine,”
White tulips—along
one binding petal
We cross a red line
a small streak of mosquito
on our white wall[,]
or in “Two,”
We rarely talk, except through blue
jeaned
knees beneath a diner counter.
This collection is above all about a
life, family, lovers, disease and healing
but it is a life lived with hands deep
in the dough with which we make feeling and muscles, mourn and cure
ourselves of mourning, if not of loss. It is a book which does what
poetry, I think, is destined to do, heal with the twists and plays of
language, that which is otherwise appears to be incurable.
