Book Review: WHY IS IT SO HARD TO KILL YOU? by Barrett Warner
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Why Is It So Hard To Kill You? by Barrett Warner |
| Somondoco Press, 2015 $14.95 |
Warner’s collection opens with, “I Thought Pigeons were Vegetarians,” a meditation on (and critique of) the concept of monogamy as expressed through the image of doves and love birds. Warner challenges preconceptions of married life and normalcy, the sickly-sweet ideas we’re often spoon-fed in childhood, contrasting them with the harsher realities of life. Similarly, Warner challenges preconceptions of nature poetry as pastoral, serene. “Poem with Only a Single Reference to a Shotgun” describes a mercy killing of a deer badly injured by a car. “I’m startled by his surrender, / turning his head to give me a better target,” Warner writes. He hauls the body into the woods and finally, “toss(es) a bucket of lime over the wound / to discourage thieves.” Even with death, the description isn’t peaceful. In fact, Warner’s final act with the deer is one of aggression; he tries to sabotage the primacy of scavengers and decay. It’s a final ‘fuck you’ to death. But this doesn’t mean there isn’t beauty in nature. Surprises still happen. “Sleeping on Sand While Dolphins Swim Past Bethany” describes exactly that, except, of course, the narrator isn’t asleep: “A few shrieks, and an olive-skinned bather says, Look! Look! / He begins counting dolphins in Arabic. // I can tell by the sincere way he’s counting/there are a lot more than five.” The narrator tries to ignore this moment of beauty and return to sleep, but the spirit of the moment sneaks in, “I am dreaming/you are brushing my hair off my eyes, // and I am not trying to bite your hand or anything.”
Warner’s poems describe moments in which the world breaks. Some of these moments are beautiful, some are tragic, and most are a combination of the two that make it impossible to pick a side. “I Thought I’d Stop Having Sex Dreams of Kim after She Broke Her Neck” is one of these latter ones. It describes the narrator’s sub/conscious fixation with “Kim,” listing some examples of dream scenarios, “outdoors, under willows, bodies quilted. / The more she takes, the more she has to hold. / The more I take, the more I let go.” Warner has set a wistful tone. He describes the injury in almost emotionless language: “Kim’s break is two knuckles down/from what they call a hangman’s fracture.” One expects the poem to end in sadness, anger, some wrenching outpouring about lost opportunities. The real accomplishment of this poem, though, comes with the turn at the end:
After lunch, I wheel her outside to the herd.
A gray horse lips and tongues her ball cap
until it finds the peppermint someone put there.
This is the one who fell on me, she says.
A lesser poet might’ve gone too heavy-handed, but Warner leaves it open, somewhat ambiguous. Is she angry? Do they laugh?
“Tanya” is a love-lost poem. The narrator receives a phone call from the titular character, a kerosene drinking hard case down in Florida, “I thumbed an atlas, scanning varicose highways. What could forty years have done to Florida?” he muses. The poem continues, “When my wife asked me for water, I reached for the bottle, drained half, and gave her the rest. I wanted to say, because I’m a mean bastard. But instead of asking why I had done that, she stared at the rain hammering our tin roof. She said, Who’s Tanya?” There’s a lot happening in that interaction. The narrator tries to lash out but his wife doesn’t even notice.
“Immortal One” gives us the book’s title. It begins, “Good morning, angel fish. / Why is it so hard to kill you?” The poem continues with a litany of pets the narrator has owned until they died or neglected until they died. In the context of the book, the fish could represent many things: love, innocence, even depression.
But underneath the darkness of Warner’s world, there’s a joie de vivre. He embraces this darkness for what it is: reality. And to explore that, honestly, means he’s going to bump up against some joy, too, even if he doesn’t want to. Most often in these poems, those things come from art and an appreciation of beauty. In his previous collection, Warner crafted a love letter to the Baltimore poetry scene. He touches on that again in some of these poems, “Thrasher,” for example, which is about novelist and skateboarder Timmy Reed, “His stories make me think of fables. / Instead of ogres and orphans there are shovels and lawnmowers, / and everyday people just trying to sort it out.” “Maine Is Not the Place to Grow Bougainvillea” is a great example of Warner’s joy. He describes a trip to a cabin, abounding with natural beauty. Warner’s great sense of humor pops up:
I imagine her sunning herself
on a chicory mat,
surrounded by Japanese poetry.Bougainvillea
is almost
one-fourth of a haiku.
The “she” in the poem scolds him about how unrealistic it is to have a tropical plant in Maine’s climate, “That plant will die in a few/weeks, she says, and then we’ll all/have to deal with your grieving.” Finally, she relents and asks, “Where do you want to put it? / Over here, I say, by the banana tree.”
But it’s not all bad between them. “Bath” is a tender, loving poem, “Julia comes midday to the hospital/to smear lunch on my lip and to wash my hair and back.” Warner describes the simple acts of her feeding him, adding ice to the soup so he doesn’t burn his lips. “I swallow three sips and go back to sleep. / When I wake she’s gone, and my hair is beautiful.”
“Wow,” gets at the heart of things. “The Yellow Pages of everything / I might have been is slimmer over time.” it begins. The poem cycles through foiled dreams, “At forty, I tear out all the Surgeon listings / when I notice the fluttering in my hand.” Finally, “I’m looking for a single listing:/Walking Around with an uncertain look on my face, / exclaiming, Wow, at frost on the turnips, / at the red smile of blood as I slice open a finger…” And in this collection, Warner has shared his true talent for cataloguing the wonders of the world as he sees them; dead horses, disappointed lovers, missed opportunities, his dead or dying hand, but also the wonder of crows grieving their own dead, a grandmother’s wisdom, the way a heart can still catch fire.