May 7th, 2008

Review by David Lee Garrison (email)

PLAYGROUND OF FLESH by Neil Carpathios       Main Street Rag PO BOX 690100 Charlotte, NC 28227-7001 ISBN # 1-59948-043-3 84 pp. $12 www.mainstreetrag.com

A visceral urgency pervades this book. It is about handling dead body parts and imagining yourself as a cadaver, hearing coins jingle in your father's pocket while standing by his grave, using a washing machine as a vibrator, seeking sexual gratification with a vacuum cleaner, making love in the kitchen and hoping the kids will think you are washing dishes. Comic or tragic, every poem in this book hits you hard in the gut.
 
It has three sections. In the first, The Smell of Death, the poet recalls his childhood as the son of a surgeon, his own work in a morgue, and his father's death. The second, The Weight of Desire, starts with a funny poem about budding adolescent sexuality, goes on to bare all in an unflinchingly honest exploration of the human need for love and sex, and ends with a poem about cicadas who wait seventeen years to mate and die "doing what they love." The last section, Moving On, deals with marriage, children, divorce, remarriage, and intimations of mortality.
 
The title poem, Playground of Flesh, appears as the second one in the book. Although the title suggests sexuality, in fact the poem has to do with a summer job during college:

...I baby-sat bodies,
assigned each a name and number
for medical students who came in spattered coats
in clots of three around each slab,
unzipped their bag and said hello.

The poet describes what the medical students do with the bodies in clinical detail--it's the kind of stuff that horrifies and fascinates at the same time. The poem ends with a surprise that mixes all of the emotions stirred up by the poem:

...I'd sit in a corner
pretending to read but pictured my head attached
to the bodies, my eyes closed, faking my death
just to have someone's hands cup my heart
like a prize tomato.

As a way of teaching the surprise of poetry, I occasionally read all but the last few lines of a poem for my students and then ask them to give it an ending. If I were to do that with this one, none of the students, nor I, would ever come up with anything like this. One of the main purposes of poetry is to knock us over with language, and no one does that better than Neil Carpathios.
 
The clinical thread sewn into the first part of the book runs through the rest of it as well. In the vacuum cleaner poem, based on a newspaper article, the poet describes the severing of

...the ligaments
that connect to the man's pubic bone,
the pudendal nerve in the perineum
which wires a man for pleasure...

The graphic nature of this description is effective because it helps to express the connection between our deepest physical and emotional needs. Why would a man insert himself into a vacuum cleaner? The man tries to explain to the 911 operator "through sobs / the weight of his desire, the bottomlessness / of his aloneness..." Yes, the whole thing sounds absurd, but as we realize in reading this book, there is a lot of painful absurdity in desire.
 
The poet brings philosophy and religion into this mix as well. In a poem about his father's death, the poet recalls the stark statement by Democritus, "Nothing exists but atoms and the void." The voice of the philosopher stands against his own cry of pain: "Stay with me a little longer." As a poet and as a son, he finds it hard to be a philosopher at this moment. "I wish / I could say his dying was beautiful." In the poem God's Experiment, a kind of modern spin-off from Paradise Lost, he writes:

With x-ray eyes He sees
the hidden bones of desire.
He takes notes.
There is a file on each one of us.
I say let Him look.

This poem, and the whole book, say, in effect, "okay, God, take a good look at this creature driven by desire, take a good look at what you made because I can't be anything but what I am." God's Experiment ends with a line that sums up Playground of Flesh through the image of the defiant tongue of writer and lover: "Let this sharp tongue eat its way into paradise."

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David Lee Garrison’s new book of poems is Sweeping the Cemetery (Browser Books).