Review of dan raphael, breath test.
Winston, Oregon:
nine muses books, 2007.
44pp. $8.00pb.
First let me say this is a
physically attractive book: an
unpretentious saddle stitched (stapled) binding with an understated cover
design that belies the explosives within, nearly square 5 by 6 inch format,
which allows the author’s long lines room to play. Technically a chapbook, at 44 pages without
the number of blank pages commonly used to fluff out many contemporary books of
poetry, it contains more substance, surely more words, than many a full-length
collection, and at $8.00 it is a welcome example of what grassroots small press
publishing can accomplish on a budget.
Raphael can be deeply
political, bitter and incisive about the state of our disunion as in “Don’t
ask; don’t tell”:
don’t ask me now
don’t turn on
the news
pass
me the bottle
light
me a pipe
fry
me a blob of mystery meat
we’ll take
off our clothes and explore
our mutual infections
our cinema bred
expectations
However, he can also be lyrically deep in
blues-centered improvisations on mortality and desire. Poems as achingly beautiful as “Cloud Pond”
from which I hesitate to excerpt, it being so much of a whole. But taste these lines and trust me the rest
is well worth returning to:
if the sky
was as thin as my flesh it would be the same color:
when rain is
scattered into gas; when sky is calcified to snow.
when I was a
kid I made angels face down, trying to fly
into the
warmth of the earth, into dark silence.
Raphael
is a master of wit and wildness but also not afraid of sentiment, which so many
poets avoid for fear of sentimentality, something entirely different, resulting
in so many barren exercises in avoidance.
This is poetry that is not afraid of excess; in fact, it embraces it,
not attempting to contain or control but merely to hold, for the moment, what
flows around and through the mind, the body.
This is a poetry to be read out loud, a record of the uncommon lives
that hunker in our houses of moss and steam, a plea for the commutation of each
sentence we wake up every morning regretting, fecundity implicit in the
conditions that allow it growth, a poetry that celebrates the sensual overload
of liquid postmodernity without neglecting the poisons that rise and fall in
that ocean’s roll. Everything occurs at
once in all the stages of its growth and decomposition. All the lies we tell about time to keep
things gradual are abolished, or if not abolished at least ignored for now, in
a Saturnalia of simultaneity.
This
is a poetics of improvisation where much of the pleasure is derived from
hearing the ideas pile up, collapse, regroup and strike out again, catching
fire from each other until the whole conflagrates into a flash of brilliances
or dies into a mellow afterglow, as when a jazz musician tears a pop tune to
shreds revealing the triviality of the artifact but blowing at the same time
what is profoundly sweet. The narrative
travels from grunts to eloquence and back again:
only when
you’re hearing all channels at once does the meaning fall together
in cold
white syllabic flames, a color of all colors and sounds, barely pulsing bass
of earths
gravitic heart: listen to the light
every day
(“Nato Report,” p. 31).
Taste, touch, smell, and, obviously,
sound compete with the traditional dominance of the visual to allow a more
complex sensual palate. There is in
particular an emphasis on eating (and drinking) — not just the relish of taste
but the ecstasy of universal devouring:
the egg our
sun is the yolk of, the wings of birds
migrating
thickly around the planet like a belt about to unfold
and
reassemble into herds of extinct browsers maintaining the earths spin
as they
meticulously manicure the prairies forests
& jungles
(“My Height in Tortillas,” p. 27).
Old
jokes and particle physics are herein revealed for what they are, namely two
versions of the same mythology. Blake
said “energy is pure delight,” and energy is what these poems are, not just
what they’re about: the positive and
negative it takes to make a spark, to kindle bliss, the interweaving that knits
the bone to flesh. All flesh is grass,
and language is the lawnmower. Reading
these poems can make your vocabulary homesick for both the primal scream and
the music of the spheres.
Ultimately
the breath test of the title is a tribute to the capacity of the lungs to
breathe deeply in the polluted wilderness
of here and now, to sing the long lines out, breathing exercises that
induce states of exhilaration and repose, the mirror held up to the mouth of an
unconscious body to determine if it’s alive. This book is proof that, in spite
of all the evidence to the contrary, we still are.