Spreading Like Wild Flowers
By
Timothy Gager
Big
Table Publishing
Boston,
MA & San Francisco, CA
ISBN:
978-1-945917-58-5
52
Pages
Review
by Dennis Daly
Well-titled
and well-introduced, Timothy Gager’s new poetry collection, Spreading Wild
Flowers, both celebrates and broods on everyday life and the persistence of a
medieval-generated, but contemporary version, of a morally centered Everyman. Gager’s
wiry verses come at you from all directions, each bloom well-rooted and well
protected against predatory aesthetes and lackadaisical flower pickers.
Lushness seems beside the point to this poet. Themes of hardscrabble continuity
and day-to-day endurance drive these poems.
Good
first poems are often set to convey a tone or emotion that engages the reader’s
psyche with a key to the miscellany that follows. Gager’s initial piece,
Concerto, does just that, while serving as a guidepost to the immediate.
Listening to the plaintive and insistent music of a saxophone does not preclude
the intrusion of an unwanted serpent. Spreading out reality’s old comforter
with (presumably) his lover, Gager, not only seeks the raw enjoyment of an
outdoor concert, but, concomitantly, confronts insidious threats to his best
intentions,
I
became lost in the bell curve,
which
a saxophone’s note made
me
contemplate: please stay present
because
I found this watching out
for
snakes is something celebrated.
Will
you ponder a geometrical illusion?
Area
and circumference?
The
formulas? Always the formulas.
Bromley’s
Funeral Home, Gager’s memento mori poem, staggers its reader like a sucker
punch. The piece’s simplicity belies our poised acceptance or quiet response to
the dearly departed. Our myths and well-meaning suppositions melt in the face
of mortality’s starkness. Gager here contemplates a tatty funeral card and it’s
not going well,
…your
face creased
On
a piece of wrinkled cardstock—you were
so
young, but the memory so ancient,
Bromley
inserted a few lines
from
an ancient Catholic Prayer
printed
over a cliched picture:
Heaven’s
light beaming down.
Or
is it shining up? I can’t question this,
or
understand a damned thing
In
his poem The Last Time I Saw You Gager reconciles or attempts to reconcile
remembrances with his once “present” life. The poet’s persona recalls the
horror of drug dependence in words seemingly dictated by the “loser bird’ in
his head. All the while Gager punctuates this poetic anti-world of his with
unpleasant smells (dead mice and acrid gas) and sounds (snorting and sniffing)
heightening the piece’s earthiness. The poet mourns the loss of a lover, who
has found a new kind of happiness in sobriety, with mixed emotions. Gager ends his
narrative wonderfully underfoot with first rate imagery,
Six
months later, I heard you lived in N’Orleans,
married
an unveiled version of me, with all my “yets”
still
to come, worse than all those
wretched
“nows.” I feel I can’t stop
from
mourning you, or the sidewalks
from
cracking, my stumble toes catching
that
uneven place where elm roots
raise
the concrete higher.
Revivals
of the body and the spirit from near endings may well be the only miracles most
flesh and blood humans will ever experience or witness. In his poem The
Miracles of Recovery Gager dwells sparsely on the phenomena underlying these
marvels. When survival happens the mind bends in unpretty ways. Blooms filled
with life retreat to the basic, the necessary for sustenance. The organism
shrinks to consolidate strength. The poet puts it this way,
Who
would have thought salvation is no longer
found
in the piss jars in old isolated bedrooms?
the
mind snaps
the
body
quakes
its resistance.
I
am one step away from
being
pushed
in
a wheelchair
when
my body fails
the
mind
perhaps
just wilts
as
a petal, the rose might—
we
are all stem, we salvage
ourselves
from this withering.
Throughout
this collection the poet exhibits a mix of raw images and damaged
contemplations. It can get exhausting. In his poem Faith Gager reaches an
oratorio of exhaustion, a creed of despair, or perhaps, more pointedly, an
enlightenment. The poet contemplates,
I
wonder why
everything
has to be.
And
I’ll never wonder,
if
we will go on forever.
And
I believe,
one
day, I will close my eyes,
to
pray—for nothing horrific to happen,
again
and again until the very last breath.
Connections
of a Bridge, Gager’s poem about new beginnings, moves in metaphoric wonderment
from fear to hope. I especially like his stanzas on the Lake Pontchartrain
Causeway, where illusion merges into realty until police intervention becomes
necessary, and the Beverly-Salem Bridge, where the soft curve of the connector
inspires remembrances of new love and upbeat anticipation. The poem opens as an
anthem to all such thoroughfares,
I
cannot look down from above,
driving
eyes locked forward to
where
I’m headed, water underneath..
The
banks are afflicted with ugly
six-pack
rings, oily vermin, and shopping carts.
But
there’s also marshland with wild flowers,
a
shadow spreading from her structure
shading
ex-lover’s torn blankets. I miss
the
beauty within these passages.
Ripped
and torn in the world’s thorny bracken Timothy Gager has bridged his way out
and across to the promised, but not perfect, land. In the process he has delivered his readers a
book of searing poetry and redemptive hope. Bravo!
