Jessica Mayhew reviews
by Michael S.
Begnal
Beginning
at the end of this collection, Michael Begnal notes the poet’s refusal “to fix
ourselves/ in time or ink” (‘Manifesto’), and this would serve just as well as
an epigram to Future Blues. This is a
collection aware of the fragility and harshness of time and language, and a
refusal to be rooted in the stasis of either. Begnal’s poetry is fluid and
immediate, and his use of textual play allows it to slip from being pinned to
the formal.
In
‘Primates,’ Begnal explores the “conception of the word/ HUMAN.” This poem
examines a photograph of a group of chimpanzees, comparing it to an
early-morning glimpse of the self in a mirror, “a face so secretly and fiercely
familiar,” which readers will be able to wryly identify with. However, this
poem also goes much deeper than the “3:10 A.M” stunned and squinting eyes, and
the knowing nudges of aging; the parallels drawn between poem and chimp
highlight the “iron light of sentience,” the harshness of knowledge.
Begnal
excels at finding just the right words to root a sentence. ‘Primates’ opens
with the line, “His eyes intimate knowledge, this chimpanzee,” the deliberate
choice of “intimate” suggesting both an ancestral closeness and the implication
of communication, and from this, the poem works around suggestion. The poet
guesses – the chimp “maybe the poet of his tribe,” and the speaker’s own
“sapience” is “unknown.” This disturbance to the ability of language to express
meaning builds to the final stanza:
tomorrow
I will kill the poachers
/I will murder the colonists
/I will cut down the loggers
/I will exterminate all the brutes
(‘Primates’)
What
seemingly begins as a threatening wish to protect the chimpanzees of the first
stanza begins to splinter, reflected in the use of the forward slashes,
building to the Heart of Darkness
climax. However, in Begnal’s poem there is no Marlow to act as editor and tear
off the postscript. The speaker becomes a Kurtz-like figure, and the violent
ambiguity of “brutes,” leads the reader back to deeper concerns of role of
language as communication.
Darkness
and language surface again in ‘Dithyramb.’ The pattern of the urban/ rural
couplets are broken when:
...I
enter the poem
and
am immediately strong-armed
into
a dark garage
where
there are no shining mirrors,
no
strains of deathless song...
(‘Dithyram’)
The
entry of the speaker disrupts the flow of the poem, and yet seems to begin the
dithyramb, which is a wild hymn to the ancient Greek God Dionysus. Begnal
attacks the urge to define:
they
claim they can define
everyone,
that I’m this or that,
a
maker of cloudy cadence...
(‘Dithyramb’)
An
urge which he ultimately defies, setting the poet alone in the urban/rural
landscape:
and
I’m out along the leaves,
olive-green
under the
streetlight
lampglow
(‘Dithyram’)
Bengal
uses the juxtaposition of the rural imagery against the streetlights to create
a hallucinogenic rebellion which both harks back to the ancient poetic
tradition and places it firmly in the contemporary.
The
theme of the poet existing outside of the established order is revisited in ‘In
an Unknown City, It Seemed.’ There is a distinct modernist atmosphere to the
poem, not in form but in content. The poet becomes a flâneur-like figure,
roaming through a disorientating city. Temporality is disrupted:
in
this part of the city
were
buildings
when
you looked at them closer
were
constructed of Mayan ruins…
(‘In
an Unknown City, It Seemed’)
This
sense of timeless isolation is shattered when the speaker of the poem
encounters another figure. There is a sense of threat at the end of the poem,
when another man emerges to see the speaker, “like a priest.”
One
of the strong points of this collection is the shift of tone between poems. In
‘The Fluctuations,’ Begnal observes, “death & loss in your twisted black
guts like shit,/ in the stark stochastic scald.” This sits alongside ‘At the
Cliff,’ where death/ time sits in contrast, “time wilts and willows,/ residue
builds sweet on the tongue.” Here, the softer assonance gives a much gentler
impression of time ebbing and flowing, rather than the harsh sounds of the
former. Throughout Future Blues,
Begnal consistently compliments the themes of his poems with a studied ear to the
sounds they make, which is apt for a collection at least partly inspired by
music. This attention to the aural is particularly effective in ‘Betty Page.’ The
classic monochromatic pin-up image is created in the third stanza:
black
her hair
and
pale white skin,
the
classic black/white
“raven”
“porcelain”
(‘Betty
Page’)
The
sound echoing through “black/classic,” and the half-rhyme of “skin/ porcelain”
draws the reader into a poem which centres heavily on the notion of darkness,
not just in colour (or lack of), but also in tone. This builds to the final
proper stanza, in which decay is emphasised through consonance, and the final
rhyme acts as an evocation of the pin-up herself:
and
clay collects in the cracks below the window
and
the furniture begins to show its age –
Bettie
Page,
Bettie Page,
Bettie Page
(‘Bettie
Page’)
“Sexless”
is scored through in this poem, an ironic nod to the epigram from Betty Page,
“I had less sex activity those seven years in New York than I had any other
time in my life.” Begnal’s use of typography and textual play works well
throughout the collection. In “Dead Rabbits,” he introduces coloured print with
the word “red,” emphasising the visceral nature of the poem. An image of a horn
is added to “Horn,” further breaking the text and bringing a visual element to
a poem focusing on sound. This typographic play could be used more often to
bring more of an impact.
Future Blues ends with a
‘Manifesto,’ summing up the poet’s intents and beliefs. This collection flits
between deaths – death of the body, death of language, death of the self – and
in this movement is the escape of expression. In ‘Manifesto,’ Begnal writes,
“for death is statis/ and poetry moves everywhere.” This collection looks to a
mythic past, even as it passes through the present. In this poem, as in the
others, there is a lack of concluding full stops, which serves to emphasise Future Blues as a continuous, supple
body of poetry.
Jessica Mayhew is a British poet, and reviews regularly for Eyewear.
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