Homeless
Chronicles from Abraham to Burning Man
reviewed by Nick Houghton
by Gerard Sarnat
Gerard
Sarnat, now in his seventh decade, has brought the precision learnt during his
medical career, combined it with the compassion acquired while running staffed
clinics for those on the margins of society, to produce a collection of great
power. By fusing his own life experiences with those of the outsiders described
in the poems, Sarnat has achieved the goal of every poet, that of making the
personal universal.
In
the opening section Sons Rise in the West,
the two poems First Times and Whimperbang: Yad Vasheem Revisited,
initially seem aesthetically worlds apart. However, the two poems are linked by
the juxtaposition of the joyfully erotic in First Times, when the poet’s first
sexual encounter is described,
basement
rendezvous dark and dank, huddled near the furnace, boil boil, trouble trouble
trouble,
and
the bleak evocation of industrialised slaughter in, Whimperbang:Yad Vasheem Revisited.
In the shadow of
cold chimneys, g-d makes us pay for the air.
Heine was right:
when books burn,
humans are destined to be next.
This
weaving together of personal rite of passage with an event – The Holocaust –
that defies understanding, is the fuel that powers this collection and, by
delivering this particular example so early in the book, the reader is quickly
acclimatised to the rarefied but entirely accessible nature of the poems.
Sarnat’s
work with addicts, the homeless and the disenfranchised – work which has formed
a significant part of his career – also powerfully informs the collection. His
eye is honest and empathic when he describes a group of homeless hostel
dwellers in The Four Corners, 2003.
untended
unpresent absentee mindbodies angular to the universe,
mostly shrouded
in grays and blacks, droop in morose lagoons,
swoon under
monsoon thickets, doze daymares on the stoop.
Sarnat’s
honesty extends to encompass the conflicting motivations that drive people who
work in this area when, in the same poem, he writes,
I giggle at us
practitioners of impermanence, mostly atheists
who worship
Monet cathedrals much as Vipassana nowhere.
yes, bricks and
mortar appear quite enduring
- a sultra of non-abdication, our
edifice complex?
This
is the kind of self-deprecating humour that is essential if one is to work
successfully with the most marginalised in society. That this is not gallows
humour though, is evidenced by the single line,
I am glad to be a physician not the coroner.
This
weights the humour, giving it a poignancy that illustrates the author’s
commitment to his work, both with people and words.
In
Irregular People: M-W-F, Sarnat
perfectly catches the trenchant yet inclusive tone of a community clinic with,
You’re on the
nod tomato can,
- it’s time to move on, and make it
quick.
It
is a testament to his humanity that he has retained a poetic ear capable of
such subtlety while delivering real care; these are messages from a hardworking
soldier in the fight against social exclusion, not mere reconnaissance. This is
driven home in the next stanza, when he paints a scene of quotidian horror, in language
as precise as any cut made with his scalpel.
Injecting her
weekly STD cocktail
through
vermillion slattern capris, I remind flaming Maria Diana
this ain’t the
place to transact charnel house commerce.
These
characters are evoked with great clarity and sympathy. I cannot recall a more
humane engagement with people on the margins of society than the one contained
in My Odyssey, My Iliad, when he describes a young, homeless Spanish man on the
street.
Tied to the
mast, sailor set to sea
without biscuit,
on the street, no way home, no family or papers,
too weak to
work, alone till the shelter re-opens tonight,
strongly
greaved, unharbored, he weeps, ‘Gracias,’
By
exploring the universal through the prism of the personal, Sarnat has
transformed these urban wraiths into a metaphor for the post WW2 refugees of
the poet’s youth in newly multi-cultural America.
Later
in the collection, his sense of isolation returns in Lost in Translation when after an afternoon of,
multicultural
allusion, intertextual repurposing,
dehyphenated
esoterica – my stomach growls,
he
sees,
passing lovers
holding hands, whispering Mandarin,
ill at ease, I
pause my cell before smoked tea duck.
As
the collection progresses, this more personal tone becomes predominant, and we
glimpse the beauty and occasional frustrations of family life as, in My Own Little Israels.
Though most of
the time time is not mine,
Once a blue moon
I shed skin
Of father,
husband, breadwinner.
Everything stops
for an afternoon.
I go inside for
a date with myself.
A matinee where
Gerard stars.’
Homeless
Chronicles from Abraham to Burning Man describes the trauma that attaches to
modernity, be it cultural dis-placement, homelessness, addiction or the
overarching horror of genocide, while still managing to retain a humane and
optimistic voice. It is uplifting to read a voice so steeped in recent history
and yet so unbowed by experience, and I am glad that Gerard Sarnat’s powerful,
incisive but above all poetic gifts have been brought to my attention.
Nick
Houghton.
Nick
Houghton has recently completed a creative writing and English literature
degree at Kingston University. His first novel, Dirty Tuesday will be
completed in September 2013.
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