Eating Raw Meat by g emil reutter,
reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos
Reading g emil reutter’s new
collection of poems Eating Raw Meat and other nuances of life is
like entering a series of museum galleries full of life: character portraits
abound, as do scenes of communal activity captured on a grander scale. Beware
the final gallery, however, as Part II of this volume represents a descent into
despair.
reutter guides us through his
museum, and as we pause to appreciate each poem, he explains his relationship
to his work, as he informs us in “Silhouette”: “So I look at these captured
memories of time and place, enjoy them without a care for what happens when I
am gone.” Among these “captured memories” are portraits of
individuals—character sketches—not necessarily flattering, but always true. In
“Raw,” which lends its name to the title of the book, the poet depicts human
frailty, fallibility, and, ultimately empathy in the brief anecdote of the
elderly man, “just an old retired guy from the neighborhood,” who mistakenly
orders the meat in his sandwich “raw” instead of “rare,” only realizing it
afterward. There are other character studies which capture a moment or feeling
as a painting might: “Quiet Men,” where we witness an elderly father and his
elderly son smoking in a park; “The Politician” who “speaks to himself” loudly
about his political opinions before returning by bus to his “darkened room of
loneliness”; an elderly woman picks sandwiches from the trash at a food
festival in “Good Times.” reutter neither condemns nor praises the characters
he observes; rather, he reports the truth of their lives with a keen eye. He
leads us to see that, like the mailman he describes in “It’s a Job,” whose name
the poet doesn’t know though he watches him work every day, that these
characters are “part of the fabric of life.” Those who reutter knows more
intimately are also captured in his poems, as in the aptly named “Painting,” in
which the poet frames his subject in a window, where “the sun gently
silhouettes your body,” and “lights your green/blue eyes that stream across the
room into mine.”
In other galleries of reutter’s
museum there are grand tableaus that teem with vibrant activity: scenes of city
life witnessed from a park, at lakes, or in the streets. In Fox Chase II,”
reutter widens his focus from a single character, situating the narrator in
“the gazebo in a small park,” where he absorbs the sights, sounds, and smells
of the shops on the bustling surrounding streets. The title of “A June
Afternoon at Core Creek Park,” echoes Seurat’s famous pointillist painting “An
Afternoon at La Grande Jatte”: reutter’s landscape depicting “the shore of Lake
Luxembourg” is equally full of picnickers drawn to nature, where “In the midst
of pavilions, barbeque, Frisbees, roller blades, a herd of deer prance . . .”
reutter is hyper-aware of nature and
its cycles, and his poems frequently record the tensions wrought by the
changing seasons or weather. He seems particularly taken by the manifestation
of the natural world within urban settings, as in “Urban Woodlands,” in which a
“no name brook eases its way out of the city” along a “dirt path that snakes
through trees and underbrush into a small valley.” Storms and heat oppress, and
city life can be bleak and lonely, yet beauty often blooms where least
expected. Many of reutter’s poems name flowers and trees, their names alone
evocative, as if they are the sunflowers of Van Gogh or the water lilies of
Monet: forsythia, hyacinth, tulips, easter lilies, hydrangea, azalea,
rhododendron. Yet while nature as seen in natural cycles renews the poet,
reutter, as he expresses in “Resting with the Moon,” feels the “tug and pull”
of the moon and its “reflected light renews” him, “nothing will change. I am
linear in destination, not circular.” The poet may recognize cycles, but though
he is situated within their gyres, he preserves his own objectivity.
reutter, in the first three-quarters
of Eating Raw Meat, seems to draw
inspiration from Whitman, whose doppelganger appears in “On the Bus with Walt” as
a bearded fellow who reads to his fellow passengers from Leaves of Grass. The captive audience applauds the old man, who
laughs heartily before whispering to the narrator, “There isn’t any money in
poetry, my friend.” Poetry may not pay, but up to this point in his volume,
reutter has shown the act of observation to be a noble enterprise that
celebrates our shared human experience, reassuring
us that there is beauty even in the contemplation of our losses, loneliness and
poverty.
The final poem of the volume’s first
section, however, suggests that reutter is turning away from observation and
celebration and investing the role of poet with a different kind of
responsibility. The narrator of “On the Rubble” is no longer merely an
observer—he is a harbinger of despair, declaring, “I stand on the rubble that
is left of the American dream, pick up a brick, look at the glass ceiling,
throw it, and watch it bounce off.” As the reader enters Part II of Eating Raw Meat, the museum of
observations is left behind, and we seem to fall into a nearly post-apocalyptic
world. Whereas the poems of Part I depict a kind of hard won beauty found in
our human struggles, those of Part II portray defeat and desolation. The cycles
of nature may still predominate, as in “Season to Season,” but it is the
“harshness in the beauty of death and renewal” that is memorialized. reutter
now directs our attention to desolation, and there seems very little to
celebrate. Generalized social criticism replaces observation, as in “In Plain
View,” where the narrator decries “a life lost in greed” in America and asserts
that we suffer from “a divide as simple as the intersection of a crumbling
alley and an avenue of greed.” In “Shadows, Dreams, and Reality” the narrator
concludes that our hopes for a positive future are a doomed dream, a “[r]everie
of jobs coming back deluded in the reality of what is.”
Observation in Part II of Eating Raw Meat has become political
commentary, and the keen, fresh eye reutter shows in the character studies of
his earlier poems is sacrificed to jeremiads like “Pennywise,” which
transparently describes our current president’s “grotesque comb over” and
“plastic smile,” calling him a “dancing clown” who “sits on his gold throne on
his tower of babble,” and leaves us smothered in a “sewer gas of despair.”
Whereas the cycles described in the earlier poems of this volume suggest that
if we look closely enough, we can find beauty entwined with our suffering,
there is little such beauty in Part II: no flowers, peaceful lakes, or gentle
snowflakes. What we’re left with are frightening scenarios as depicted in
“Machines Ply Their Trade,” where, reutter concludes, “Though no one can see,
the misers are dancing,” as “[v]iolence is the way of the world,” and “it seems
it will never change.”
Is reutter declaring that our world
has become so inhospitable, our plight so desperate, that hollow ranting is all
that’s left to the poet? Is shouting the only volume remaining for the
visionary? It may be that reutter’s goal is to shock his audience into action
before it’s too late, but the last lines of the final poem in the collection,
“Hullabaloo,” tell us bluntly that the time for salvation is past: “Nirvana is
empty, the second coming has been cancelled.” Apparently Whitman has gotten off
the bus and has left no forwarding address.
