February 25th, 2009
Review by Ted Gilley
ALSO IN ARCADIA
by Andrew Mulvania
Backwaters Press
3502 North 52nd St.
Omaha, NE 68104-3506
ISBN 978-0-9816936-3-7
2008, 67 pp., $16.00
http://thebackwaterspress.com/
Andrew Mulvania’s present-day Arcadia lies in the southern part of the United States, just as the Arcadia of legend lay, similarly isolated, in the Peloponnesus of Greece. Rural Missouri, while less remote, nevertheless qualifies as the kind of place out of which genuine, if obscure, legends might arise. In Mulvania’s hands, the life of small towns and a family farm, conducted in a somewhat somber pageant of narratives balanced by near-perfect lyric elegies, carves a chapter into the black earth of southern literature with the sureness—and occasional unsteadiness—of a horse-drawn plow.
The poems of how-to and make-do, of fishing by lamplight, of picking blackberries, exploring creaky barns, of county fairs and country characters in church basements, are rendered at length in unrelenting, determined detail. One’s pleasure in reading about the childrens’ Halloween celebration (“All Hallows Eve, Solid Rock Baptist Church”) is diminished by the lack of pleasure the poet seems to feel in describing it; the poem has the timbre, pacing, and studied affect of a dutifully delivered sermon. In poems of similar tone, such as “Osage County Fair” and “Putting in the Garden,” Mulvania takes such pains in description, you wish he’d move along a little more smartly, only to discover in the end that description was the point. Is that ever enough?
The poems, for the most part, relate aspects of Mulvania’s childhood, but their lessons can be obscure: in “The House” we are given a tour from the sentimentalized top—“tin roofs and the lightning-rodded night”—to bottom, “the dropped summer kitchen of oven and bread.” But while the description, if sweeping, is complete, what is less clear is why it matters enough to be told. “I think I liked it best on rainy Sundays” the poet remarks, unremarkably, as the poem draws down, ending with a picture of the children “ … amusing ourselves as quietly as cats in a corner/while our father worked, and Mother read … ” And? one wants to ask. What happened then?
But in the lyric poems, Mulvania shines: the marching diction falls away, and in poems like “Baptism at Pointer’s Creek,” “Visitation for the Neighbor Boy,” and “Elegy for Gary Wolfe,” the poet puts aside his bricks and mortar. In “Visitation … ” Mulvania recounts a funeral parlor’s calling hours in terse, three-line stanzas. Focusing almost exclusively on the sign outside the chapel—and noting that the white letters against a black background can be made to spell anyone’s name, the poet reads off
a name that no one can call him again
except in remembrance, or to speak of someone
who came too soon to what we’ll come to in the end—
a name up on the sign the traffic slows
to read before it goes, nevertheless,
on its way. Today, his name, not ours […]
It is not until the final stanza that we find ourselves inside, filing past the body as “ … the horrible organ music drags its feet/and he just lies there like that and won’t move.” The poem slams shut with the finality of a coffin lid coming down.
The book’s title echoes the Latin phrase, “Et in Arcadia ego” (“Even in Arcadia I am”), a memento mori or reminder of the inevitability of death that is more than justified in poems such as “Sunrise Service, Solid Rock Baptist Church” and “Far From Home, I Remember the Neighborhood, and Joe Wolfe, Gone.” In “August Elegy,” a shuffle of accordian-pleated lines recounts the pleasures of summer, concluding with the bittersweet memory of a friend’s death:
In a few days, my friend will die
again, in memory, as he does each year at this time,
and, again, I won’t have said goodbye.
For now, something golden is coming over the fields,
over all the small towns around here,
their parish picnics, their courthouses and spires,
something golden, dragging its tale of fire.
One could substitute tail for tale in that final line, as the poet surely intended us to imagine not just the end of a day or a season, but the inevitable end of all we know, and the dragon of death, fiery and beautiful, moving through life. Fine work.
In another fine poem, “Living Will,” Mulvania muses on what at first seems an idle notion: how “nice” it would be to be buried in the middle of a cornfield just off the the interstate. Nice? But in a few deft strokes the poet fleshes out the scene, description, in this case, giving way swiftly to an image of the highway as a river that
… unfolds forever in two directions,
from one side of the country to the other,
an asphalt Acheron enforcing the divide
between this world and the next […]
The poem concludes, as it began, economically, lightly, gracefully.
Elsewhere, the poet’s hand can be heavy. The distracting glosses and annoying habit of name-dropping weigh down the poems, which struggle to conclude. In “Brueghel Diptych: 1. Hunters in the Snow (Winter)” no fewer than five poets are named. The author is in his professor’s chair; a seminar is in session. I suspect that readers not familiar with the names of Berryman and Williams (no first names provided, of course) won’t automatically attempt to Google these mystery men but will instead simply move on, convinced that they’ve walked into the wrong room. But I’ve little doubt that Mulvania reckons his readers are other poets and that, therefore, everyone will know who Berryman is. Finally, the over-the-top strenuousness (or strange comedy?) of titles like “Elegy with Variations on Donald Justice’s ‘Variations for Two Pianos’” is bewildering, and undermines slightly the more serious writing. But these points cannot draw our attention for long from the many virtues of Mulvania’s work.
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Ted Gilley is a writer and editor living in Vermont. (tedgilley-copyediting.blogspot.com)
In his review of Mulvania’s collection Gilley’s misguided candor (obvious boredom with lucid description, toothy snarls about “obscurity”) makes up for what he lacks in the “art of attention.” Take a case in which Gilley’s self-congratulatory indulgence in a compelling if clichéd turn of phrase translates into reckless critical analysis. Although generally complimentary of “Visitation for the Neighbor Boy,” Gilley writes, “[t]he poem slams shut with the finality of a coffin lid coming down.” But the poem, and very importantly for this collection, its location in the narrative arc of the book, clearly frustrate such an absolute response to death. By the time we read this poem, Mulvania has blocked out its narrative content so that we know the death of Joe Wolfe is a past event. But Mulvania casts “Visitation…” entirely in the present tense. The last sentence of the poem, quoted by Gilley, uses temporal and spatial deixis to drop us into the scene’s here and now, which is on the brink of taking our turn to pay our respects to the deceased: “Today [time: present], his name, not ours [first person plural deictically inclusive of speaker and audience], / which is why, inside, we’ll [again, first person plural deictically inclusive of speaker and audience] file past him in groups, / as the horrible organ music drags its feet [fabulous language—and smart: we shuffle past the deceased in time with the dirge (and I have been passing over the artful nuance of such moves as the way —or— sounds in “horrible” and “organ” enact lament)]/ and he just lies [“just” renders the potentially simple verbal aspect of “lies” progressive] there [deixis: the deceased is in front of us] like that [again, deixis: the deceased is in front of us] and won’t move [present tense].” Rather than closure—and indeed, the poem is among other things an antidote to closure—the verbal tense and the flood of one-syllable words in the last line push the experience of death into an open-ended present. But not exclusively as a memento mori, though that’s a loosely viable reading of “Visitation…” If Gilley could have overcome his irresistible attraction to his funereal turn of phrase, rather than seeing the poem “slam shut,” he might have noticed that a poem about death—a poem about a past death that is committed to the present tense, to the here and now—is followed by a poem about baptism, “Baptism at Pointer’s Creek.” In particular, a baptism of the deceased in “Visitation…” Mulvania has so carefully sculpted his book that formal patterns and thematic echoes at the global level of the work as a whole make it possible—by design, as Gilley fails to notice—to interpret the juxtaposition of “Visitation…” and “Baptism…” as a translation of the memento mori ‘Remember that you die’ theme into a theme of memento vivere ‘Remember that you live’—with all the mess that such living entails, including, yes, death. A poet of Mulvania’s talent and commitment deserves, to say the least, a less petulant reader than Gilley appears capable of being. Indeed, Mulvania deserves many readers, beginning perhaps with readers of online poetry reviews and comments on those reviews. Here I have responded to a single favorable assessment of *Also in Arcadia*; this response implies that Gilley’s criticisms of the book are even more suspect. I hope that by demonstrating how much art is in one sentence of one Mulvania poem, I have done more to celebrate his work than to warn Rattle and its readers against book reviews by Gilley.
I was surprised to learn that my ‘favorable assessment’ of Andrew Mulvania’s poetry in Also in Arcadia makes my criticisms of the work even more suspect than they already are. Good gracious, watch that flying spatial deixis, Mr. Wells! I’m sure my remarks about ‘Visitation for the Neighbor Boy’ deserve much less of a lecture. Perhaps instead of warning Rattle readers against my reviews, Mr. Wells might give Rattle readers a little more credit. But it could be that his concern is less with poetry than with the deadly serious academic bona fides he displays in his remarks. Far from demonstrating how much art resides in ‘one sentence of one Mulvania poem,’ Mr. Wells has shown instead just how much hot air is needed to bolster his thin-skinned rebuttal.