The Last Predicta

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Chad Davidson
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008
Review by Rebecah Pulsifer

. . . . .At once a swaggering sensory jumble, a renewal of the urban pastoral, and a wise illumination of the everyday commercial ritual, Chad Davidson’s The Last Predicta invites its readers to find beauty where they least expect it: the franchise, the gas station, the cheerleader. In The Last Predicta, disaster is a place, and we’re standing on its corner. It is “a small store selling gasoline, / coffee, cigarette lighters, Starburst;” it is also “Like the American finch, building / its nest so tight its nestlings drown / in storms….” Splitting open the insides of Gold’s Gym and Target, Davidson reveals the sometimes elegant, sometimes gritty machinery of an urban life fueled by dollars and knickknacks: “the Milano-style whatnot” that is so familiar and so rarely examined.
. . . . .In some ways, The Last Predicta chips away at a literary taboo by opening the door on contemporary American capitalism without apology and without regret. The speaker in these poems is at once persistent and playful, facing the “dear church of the cherished storage bin, / dear Cheerios and the bowl to drown you in” head-on. Although the book will numb the reader with its brand names—the Maglite, the Chevy, the transfigured Predicta—it will revive the reader with its reverence for words, sound, and syntax. In “Diva,” Davidson writes:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . …I’d like to

. . . . . . . . . . . . . slip out and slide to the spout
. . . . . . . . . . . . . end of that buoy throatwise
. . . . . . . . . . . . . and risen to song. This is weird,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . I tell myself, by which I mean
. . . . . . . . . . . . . the Anglo-Saxon kind, which kills
. . . . . . . . . . . . . the very veery my heart adores.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . Heart, if you have the heart,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . help me swing the dinghy round.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . We have but one tongue between us.

The tongue of the reader becomes the text of the speaker; moments of “Tequila-Sunrise sun” and “the iPod snug in its skin” reveal that the absolution for our spending and our Hollywood-ized melodramas is that by these we unearth new coincidences of adjective and noun that can further piece together the scraps of meaning we are given. Despite the hopelessness of lines like “the watermelon… / and the black seeds pregnant with possibility, / aching for their hour, which passed some time ago,” The Last Predicta is at best a starry-eyed cynic. It mourns lives that succumb to the malaise of consumption, but delights in that same act, which offers a new path for language.
. . . . .Perhaps the most concrete identity in The Last Predicta is the city of Los Angeles. Davidson often nods to the movie industry and the car culture so often associated with the California coast; in addition, his swift yet sprawling images and rollicking enjambment build a city of their own across the page: it mirrors the physical space from which the speaker watches “a new star scarring the night’s black bay / above Los Angeles.” Nature is not absent from L.A., but it is only a “forgettable desert,” one of the reasons The Last Predicta seeks new deltas of image and sound in glossy store aisles and the “warehouse sky.” In turning away from nature, Davidson often turns to the television—“the Brady Bunch who aged sixty minutes each week;” in short, towards the forced reality of entertainment. But does the glamorized cheerleader—whose choreography “is nothing / if not naked prophecy”—reflect Hollywood’s glitter, or does the Predicta simply capture and stage the consumer’s own complex patterns? It is a question that follows Oscar Wilde’s central paradox in “The Decay of Lying,” and one that Davidson argues both sides of. Los Angeles is a place where this can happen. Davidson uses the city for its vibrancy and re-shelves it at more intimate moments, when the landscape of The Last Predicta is undefined or scattered: it becomes any place where “The sun chokes on the fishbones of TV antennae.”
. . . . .In its later sections, The Last Predicta seems to grow older, calling up Byron and Eliot where before the reader met Sheila in the gym or a naked woman serving sushi. The language-games of the book’s earlier sections are pressed by the weight of titles like “The Divine,” “Advent,” and “Idol.” Yet the poems here still retain their earlier energy even as they turn towards more familiar literary spaces. In “The Death of Byron,” Davidson’s variation on his earlier themes is perhaps more somber or more introspective:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . The unpeopled landscape was that much more
. . . . . . . . . . . . . unbearable after we invented nature.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . We picked up our futures, what little we could
. . . . . . . . . . . . . find in the rumped commotion of the back-heavy,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . while entire pastures, whole heaps, waited for us
. . . . . . . . . . . . . where we had come from. Had you looked up then
. . . . . . . . . . . . . (I did), you would have seen the moon open its hinges
. . . . . . . . . . . . . like a jaw and shut. Shut up. Shut down.

Albeit without some of The Last Predicta’s initial spunk, the later poems gracefully consider questions first introduced wittily yet fleetingly. Here, Davidson gives the speaker more time to reflect on what before were joyful fragments: glass shards waiting to be softened by the ocean.
. . . . .The Last Predicta lets a little more light into the world we already are living in. It toys with the reader; it both offers up a new vocabulary and commissions it to build a town, towers and all. Davidson’s latest book sparkles and flirts, “mock[s] sacrificial rites,” and holds forth both the question and the answer in a voice at once challenging and wise.



Rebecah Pulsifer is the Associate Editor of OT!M.

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Dear Apocalypse

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K.A. Hays
Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2009
Review by Rebecah Pulsifer

. . . . .In Dear Apocalypse, nature is not the backdrop to a speaker’s narrative; it is the narrative, and K.A. Hays allows each hyacinth, each plot of earth, and each season to exist as it always will: in a fluid, halfway state. Here, an untouched garden is a site of action, where “soon, the rattler, tomorrow, will swallow us, / its skin first gold, then brown, then shed….” So often in Dear Apocalypse the landscape and the speaker blur or enmesh, a strange unity—as if the subject is the object—that the speaker pushes to its limit: “I want to see / as a garden would, in winter: the toad / under leaves, mapped in brown….” Here, in a world created by an “arbitrary crash,” living things must tend to or become each other as defense against an always immanent yet opaque unmaking, which may someday leave only “bugs who have no sense / of the tragic.” But though the speaker imagines “How brown it would be” to become a turtle and nestle in “the profound mud,” one fact denies that: while nature is content to bury itself and “hulk on,” the speaker must grapple with the patterns of this world, collecting and shaping them into moments rich with the about-to-be-losing, which Dear Apocalypse both mourns and rejoices in.
. . . . .Dear Apocalypse relies as much on sound as image to welcome in the reader. Many poems offer delicate rhymes that are as unexpected and necessary as rays of light, as in “The Way of All the Earth” (which will be included in The Best American Poetry 2009):

. . . . . . . . . . . . . When the winter of dust
. . . . . . . . . . . . . blustered sixty-four million years back,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . and the great beasts who stalked the land suffered
. . . . . . . . . . . . . and fell, their bulk heaving the hills—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . all of that was only a loud game of billiards
. . . . . . . . . . . . . to the turtles, who sank down away from the light
. . . . . . . . . . . . . and let the arms and legs float in the waters,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . each belly atop another shell, the skin assuming
. . . . . . . . . . . . . the work of the lungs, so the lungs—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . as the earth above wasted and tore—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . might, through that din, be still.

Here, the sound-scape is crafted so carefully that the trail of vowel sounds seems to open up a new language or even new images for the poet to pursue. This is a music Hays often returns to: like the wren in her poem “But Then Again It Might Be Possible,” the speaker “has a double / voice, halftones and overtones, released / in the same moment.”
. . . . .The poems in Dear Apocalypse spend many lines imagining another existence, a sort of in-between space in which the speaker can reject the temporal, the limited, and the human by envisioning a role in nature’s careful repetitions. In “That Death,” the speaker admits the distance that exists between herself and a brush wolf:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . ...It loped,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . a line no longer than a hyphen,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . and skimmed the scrub a half mile off,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . then sat, to make a silhouette

. . . . . . . . . . . . . of dog (but not quite dog). I sensed
. . . . . . . . . . . . . what it was, but did not want to come
. . . . . . . . . . . . . to the fact (to touch the rib, to rub

. . . . . . . . . . . . . the raked fur at the crown).

The speaker hesitates in the moment before recognition, a tense deliberation that mirrors other moments in Dear Apocalypse: in “Hyacinths,” the speaker raises bulbs—“like ancient kiln-fired balls”—noting “A bulb will rot in water, / so it must sit, hanging over / what could end it.” The speaker makes dog from wolf; friend from predator, toying with the earth’s coincidences though they may become danger, apocalypse, the irrefutable ending so often hinted at throughout Hays’ book. To accomplish this wire-walking, the voice in Dear Apocalypse is often whimsical and bold. The title poem confides in the reader: “we had / a god who grumbled. . . .through us… / He was, like any other man,. . . .complicated.” In “I Don’t Believe the View from Here,” Hays writes of a whale’s baleen:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . How easy it would be
. . . . . . . . . . . . . if I had a filter like that for perception,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . so only, say, honeydew and the words of true prophets
. . . . . . . . . . . . . could rush in like nourishing plankton while my own death
. . . . . . . . . . . . . and the suffering of others couldn’t reach me
. . . . . . . . . . . . . but were stopped just at the lip—

There is the sense that these speckles of imagining, this unapologetic frankness, this delightfully peculiar voice is constructing magic from the darkness, or—in the words of Hays—“doing what conditions urge.”
. . . . .Dear Apocalypse holds the world by the hand while allowing it to evolve and die. Its richness of image is like looking in a snow globe and seeing every memory in order; its prismatic voice is like opening the door to a mind and examining each thought as it strolls past. Hays’ book will both cringe at the apocalypse and write to it a letter, sharing such immediacy, such beauty, and such boldness that it—and us, the lucky readers—might be made to remember something of this world.

Rebecah Pulsifer is the Associate Editor of OT!M.

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Francis d’Assisi 2008

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Poetry chapbook by Gary Metras
Finishing Line Press, 2008
Review by Rebecah Pulsifer

. . . . .In Gary Metras’s rich, chapbook-length sequence on the life of Francis d’Assisi, the reader is welcomed into a teaming, imagistic world where Francis “hear[s] God in birdsong” and is “the witness of a doe birthing a fawn / in a florid clearing....” An elegiac remembrance of the patron saint of animals and the environment, Francis d’Assisi 2008 traces the life of Francis from the beginnings of his religious awakening to long past his death, when his message still reaches “the beggar woman by Bernini’s fountain… the one with the lion in the cave of water....” As the sequence progresses, tension grows between the modern world (where “fathers…/ strap bombs to their daughters”) and Francis’ peaceful message. The two act as a counterpoint to one another, resolving finally in the sureness of a moment unquestioningly believed:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . Because a child ignores the tourists and only steps
. . . . . . . . . . . . . on the white stones to enter the cathedral

. . . . . . . . . . . . . Because sheep graze the hillside

. . . . . . . . . . . . . Because a woman loves you

. . . . . . . . . . . . . there is God

. . . . . . . . . . . . . There

. . . . . . . . . . . . . is.

. . . . .Despite the occasional condemnation of the modern world—which Metras represents as “the great age of global leisure”—Francis still has a place here: a beggar woman “lifted her face to me when I placed a euro in her hand….” At times fearful of the shifting face of religion and nature, Francis d’Assisi 2008 finds its stride when it allows the colors of the old and the new to run together in what becomes simultaneously an impressionistic elegy to simplicity and a patient urban pastoral. Ultimately, Metras’s careful craft and sensitive lineation paint the life of a familiar figure in crisp, evocative images. Both for spiritual refreshment as well as literary pleasure, Francis d’Assisi 2008 is well worth reading.



Rebecah Pulsifer is the Associate Editor of OT!M.

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Dear Anaïs: My Life in Poems for You

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Poetry chapbook by Diana Raab
Plain View Press, 2008
Review by Rebecah Pulsifer

. . . . .Dedicated to the introspective diarist Anaïs Nin, Diana Raab’s Dear Anaïs captures with painstaking precision brief autobiographical snapshots of the poet’s own life. Memories heavy with the speaker’s relationship to her parents, drugs, death, and men vie for primacy in this warm collage, which utilizes a stark—almost journalistic—narrative style. The speaker’s reflections are sometimes unexpected and always highly personal, cataloging in relentless detail her skating lessons as a child, a road trip to Woodstock, and afternoon walks with an admired lover. At its best, Dear Anaïs offers a chiseled look into the making of a woman. The book’s opening poem, “Klein’s,” captures a surprising bluntness that Raab tames persistently with her photo-like images and glaring syntax. The poem is a rich description of the New York City of the speaker’s childhood:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . ...until nighttime when we mount

. . . . . . . . . . . . . the same train back to our quiet
. . . . . . . . . . . . . neighborhood in Queens where the loudest
. . . . . . . . . . . . . sound you’ll hear is a cat crying in the
. . . . . . . . . . . . . dead of a hot summer night.

. . . . .The danger in this type of ruthlessly direct writing is that at times it wavers between honesty and flatness. In lines like “I hate how horses make me feel,” or “I live to write / so I shall not die,” the speaker’s dedication to detail and self-reflection becomes like a room without a door: the poem collapses into darkness; the reader gropes for a place to exist in a wash of literal language. Ultimately, Raab’s homage to Nin resonates with an unparsed honesty that offers a complete and unsparing story of a life. Dear Anaïs is a gift of complete admiration from one writer to another.

Rebecah Pulsifer is the Associate Editor of OT!M.

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