Vengeful HymnsMarc J. SheehanThe Ashland Poetry Press |
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Reviewed by Keith Taylor
Readers didn’t have to go very far into Marc J. Sheehan's 1999 book Greatest Hits to realize that the author meant the title only with the greatest irony. The quiet personal lyrics of his poems were crystal clear, comfortable with local and popular reference, but never flashy. Even if they risked the occasional flatness, they invited the reader in rather than attempting to overwhelm with surface pyrotechnics.
As those pyrotechnics have come to dominate much of the new poetry that’s out in the world, Sheehan is one of many who have gone off by themselves and continued working on the issues that preoccupy him in ways that engage his imagination. The result is a poetry that feels both urgent and removed from any particular style of the moment. He has fashioned the poetry of a life rather than of a career.
Most of the poems in Sheehan’s Vengeful Hymns, winner of this year's Ashland Poetry Prize, start from a connection made between the poet and the puzzling world that keeps presenting itself to the poet’s perceptions. “Detour outside Walhalla, Michigan,” the second poem in the book, begins:
I was thinking about other things back then
so I didn’t see, there past the Road Closed sign
I’d driven around, how a washed-out bridge makes
the space over a river emptier
than where there was never a bridge at all.
But don’t blame me for that—I had yet to lose
a job, a wife, certain weekends, the wicker
creel I used to keep drafts of poems in.
Even in these few lines there are markers of several things Sheehan is able to do with a quiet mastery: He doesn’t have to stress the joke in the title, but can just let it stand. It’s enough that there is such a place as Walhalla, Michigan, and that there could be a detour somewhere outside it. Paradise is probably not where we expect it and we’d probably miss it anyway, if we could ever get anywhere close. Even if we did get there, it probably wouldn’t live up to its billing. The lines seldom scan to the beat of the metronome but still have a blank verse feel to them, and often work in a stately way to organize the complicated syntax of the sentences. Although there are no highlighted figures of speech, no stretching after either easy or complicated similes, Sheehan is comfortable with the metaphoric weight of that “washed-out bridge,” and with the connection it makes to the lost things of the poet’s life. It’s a move that makes me think of Pound’s dictum—“The natural object is always the adequate symbol.” And the last element in these lines, the association of event and metaphor to the act of writing poetry, is also an important move in many of Sheehan’s poems.
All of these items add up to a quality that I would like to define more precisely than the much over-used “tone of voice,” but I seem to be stuck with that. I don’t mean, however, to use the word “tone” and the word “voice” in the way they’ve been beaten to death by a few too many dissertations. I mean the phrase the way my mother mean it forty years ago when she said, “Don’t use that tone of voice with me.” Except my mother meant it because I’d exhibited some puerile rebellion, and in the context of Sheehan’s poems I give it a completely positive spin. This poet shuns any trace of self-aggrandizement. There is something absolutely winning about the character of the poet as he presents himself in these poems—a quiet and unassuming Midwestern American of exquisite perception and deep study, who seems perpetually stunned by his place in the world. In “The Fishermen,” Sheehan describes the scene at what might be a Great Lakes harbor: “Out on the breakwater, they stake their places/firmly as gargoyles, supplicants or women/watching over the tomb.” In the long Christian tradition, he continues understanding the fishermen and their almost religious devotion to their task in the light of New Testament metaphors, but he keeps himself removed from the scene until close to the end of the poem:
There’s a limit to what they can catch, but I
don’t know what it is or what they’re fishing for.
I head towards shore behind an old man
wheeling a stack of plastic buckets lashed
to a battered golf bag pull-cart with all
the love of someone for his oxygen tank.
Who doesn’t want to be able to breathe
the blue, unbearable air of heaven?
To which the fishermen would answer, “Ah, Jesus!”
and cast their weighted bait back under the waves.
After all his precise observation, and his willingness to recognize the wonder his neighbors on the dock are experiencing, the poet doesn’t claim to share it. Rather than accepting any easy blessing, he remains puzzled even by the things he sees very clearly.
Over the course of Vengeful Hymns, this humility before the world becomes very winning. Marc Sheehan absolutely convinces us when he pauses to say “how stunning the present!” And he celebrates that present, recognizing that it is “breath-taking,” even as the on-rushing moment of our mortality is “taking your breath away.” This memorable book moves from loss to the tentative joys of the moment with delicate, serious, meticulously crafted poems that carry the weight, humor and quiet laughter of a real life.