Born With
By Michael Daley
Dos Madres Press
Loveland, Ohio
ISBN:
978-1-948017-85—5
85 Pages
Review by Dennis
Daly
The art of narrative
indirection requires not only a studied callousness, but also an abundance of fervor
and a willingness to change course on a dime. Many of Michael Daley’s poems initially
spit mulled anger and resentment through and out of his earthy stanzas before
metamorphosizing into the most hopefully dressed, delicate winged lyrics (or
vise versa). Daley manages this by strategically interrupting his story-line or
ending it abruptly, then dwelling on the word power that got him to that point.
Among School
Children opens Daley’s poetic collection with a delightful tale about the
utilitarian use of a student’s ugly suspenders by a frantic schoolteacher. The
poet, himself brags that “I’ve lifted hundreds out of sorrow with my story. / If
I’ve known you a week, I’ve told it three times.” The story ends predictably
enough with the protagonist child lashed to his chair with said suspenders as
the fire alarm rings. But the piece doesn’t end there. Employing a metaphor of
life altering implication, Daley comments on the rest of his artistic career
with his fearful ending,
After a
lifetime, I understand her calm, her need
to reassure
us—we were babies—but I knew then—
her eyes on
me—my best friends giggling as they filed
to safety, some
looking back—her eyes on me,
that silent
glare from my first cherished Muse—
I knew she would
leave me to burn.
Another poem set
early in his collection, Daley entitles Awakening in Five Irish Towns. In this
eight-stanza piece the poet takes his own measurement foretelling the general
bent of his future from the lifelines on the palms of his hands and the posture
of other hands. His narrative documentation devolves into an historic dreamtime
and back again. In one stanza, set in the legendary city of Cobh, Daley
confronts the statue of a rebel ancestor, Eamon O’Dalaigh (Ned Daly), a leader
of the 1916 Irish Rebellion. O’Dalaigh was later shot by a British firing squad
for his troubles. The poet laments the loss of focus as the stubborn courage of
his contemporary Bobby Sands and other Irish hunger strikers are barely
remembered,
Later I awoke,
my clothes still drenched,
in a train car
next to a man and a woman
who knew him as
Ned Daly,
citizens who
barely could recall the Maze hunger-
strikers wiped
out of history as if a tornado
scoured prayer
beads from their hands.
In Daley’s poem,
Children of the Storm, his persona encounters hurricane refugees from New
Orleans, flush with cash. The man, who has a patch over one eye, hopelessly in
love. The woman on a mission. They buy an oversized desk to take with them to
Montana in their van. There is mystery here. Possibly alcoholism and violence. They
also own a dog and a gun rack. But the
rest of the story is not forthcoming. Instead, the poem becomes an internal
conversation and a judgment of good character. The poem concludes with that
judgment,
Wish I’d shown
some sympathy for the eye.
Or his Homeric
allusions. She’s loved him at least
the dog’s whole
life. She hunted this desk, after all.
She and Polyphemus
will lug it bovver twelve steps.
Is that how they
me?
Sobered up and
blasted out of New Orleans?
It swells their
estate of antiques.
A gun rack
great-grandfather milled,
a thing he’ll
never pawn.
Gentle people,
small talk.
Perhaps more
than any other piece, Daley’s title poem, Born With, delivers both his pragmatic
narrative pull and extraordinary lyrical power that works in another dimension,
a more ethereal plane. The two angles of perception almost compete in the arena
of Daley’s page. Yet, strangely, the
entire tableau is painted within a phone call from the old man to his poet-son.
Hurricane weather had burst into the old man’s home and chaos ensues. A 911
call is made and fireman arrive to tend to the old man and plug up the holes in
his dilapidated house. After the fact, the actions of these brave interlopers
invigorate the man and transport him outside himself. He becomes amazed at the
goodness of the external world. Listen to Daley’s exquisite language,
They came
through the howler—winter a curse off ocean-
driven snows,
sea wall crushed
on, hour by iced hour, wave on top of wave.
A spray on the
porch so nonchalant was ironically gentle.
In strobe light
emergency they bustled in,
Burley friendly
guys, meaty fists lugged soot-pocked helmets,
one of them
bandy-legged with a worried smile—and up
he said, right
up the steps to the bedroom,
the old marriage
bed emptied—
he wouldn’t have
mentioned to them
much less to
me—thirty years ago,
the room itself
draped in dust and salt rot,
or that he slept
in a room even noisier—
howl of ghost
winters gurgled
sea rash, wave
toss, rock crack—
a gaggle in the
old man’s dream…
First the poet
details the procedure, then fury sets in, then numbness spreads in his piece
entitled The Last Master—about the euthanasia of a dog. I like this poem a lot,
but it is a little too close to home. Glossing past the tendency to
anthropomorphize and the obvious emotionality of the moment, the poet turns
sadness into acrimony. We are talking about love and the death of
consciousness, aren’t we? Here is how the piece concludes,
We’re past the
sniff of bush, piss on tree,
black eye rolled
back to the master, last wag,
past the killing
praise, softly voiced, Good Boy,
that soothes an
old man’s rage and stops my heart.
Some poets are
born with an internalized muse, a muse who has a will of her own and a set of
contrary aesthetics. Daley is one of these hosts. The lucky bastard.
