Bryan R. Monte
AQ39 Spring 2024 Book Reviews
Coincidentally, I received two new books from the same press by two poets who have already published several critically-acclaimed books (and several poems in Amsterdam Quarterly.) These poets and books are Jane Blanchard’s Metes and Bounds and Matthew Brennan’s The End of the Road. The publisher of both collections is Kelsay Books in American Fork, Utah, who I was previously acquainted with due to their presence at literary and/or history conferences in the US, and who also published Jennifer L. Freed’s When Light Shifts: A Memoir in Poems, reviewed in AQ33. Blanchard’s and Brennan’s books, as the latter’s book title suggests, are about a summing up: ruminations on the past and the physical and mental challenges faced in later life. And coincidentally, both books use formal verse, Blanchard’s exclusively and Brennan’s occasionally, forms of poetry with which I am familiar, but with which, I must confess, I do not always feel at home. (I never create a poem with a formal line pattern and/or rhyme scheme unless the poem generates it itself).
Blanchard’s poetry collection, Metes and Bounds, contains 65 poems. However, even though it is not divided into sections, it has overarching topics and themes such as domestic relations, mythology, religion, family history, and health problems that carry throughout this book. In addition, its poems are written in a wide-range of poetic formats: couplets, triolets, quatrains, sonnets, and villanelles, among others. Its author is a part of a mature couple and contains later-life observations. In their home—as in the collection’s first poem‘Matrimony’—their ‘books arranged on separate shelves /Are emblematic of [their] selves—’. ‘Scape’ contains a late winter/early spring gardening scene, but even this idyllic setting starts to turn as the poet notices the bulbs waning potency, ‘Two or three / Inch-thin green leaves was what most could produce’. The third poem, ‘More than Myth’ at first seems to be a modern retelling of Hercules battle with the Hydra, comparing his superhuman actions to the more human ‘lame game’ of crushing a crab underfoot. That is, until the terminal line, which mentions the constellation ‘Cancer’ foreshadowing the speaker’s partner’s battle with the big ‘C’.
Other subjects covered in this collection are abusive or predatory relations such as a domestic abuser in ‘Southern Gothic’, a gold digger with an aging husband, who hurries to put his other foot in the grave in ‘Mantis’, and an alcoholic, compulsive gambler wife in ‘Emerald Princess’. Metes and Bounds also has many religious poems such as ‘Exegesis’, ‘Flower of the Field’, and ‘Anticipation’, poems with nods to famous poets and artists such as Robert Frost in ‘Rote’, Emily Dickinson in ‘#1776’, John William Waterhouse in ‘Rites and Wrongs’, and William Wordsworth in ‘World without End’. Included are several political poems—one entitled ‘Email’ with an epigraph ‘from Hillary to Huma’ and another, ‘My Fellow Americans’, mentioning ‘Un-Presidential rants and raves’. Lastly, there are many medical poems, including those about treatments at the Mayo Clinic.
Despite the previous, serious list, this book contains many poems which caused me to unexpectedly laugh aloud. Part of the pleasure I derived from these poems is due to their tight, metrical structure which builds up the tension as they progress, which is sprung like a mousetrap at the very end, mostly due to Blanchard’s fresh and unexpected terminal rhymes. This occurs in poems such as ‘Email’ whose last lines are ‘Your man, like mine, must now refrain / until the end of my campaign.’ or ‘Mantis’, ‘(my) eyes peering over reading glasses at / a specimen not nearly rare enough.’ However, some have a serious satisfying finality such as in ‘Era Over’ ‘A century and a half of fun / Has reached the end of its long run.’ or in ‘Under Oath’, ‘If truth be told in part or whole, / the facts themselves are not enough.’ Furthermore, this book expanded my rather limited knowledge of ornithology through ‘Molothrus ater’ about the brown-headed cowbird, one of North America’s most abundant species, which are brood parasites like the European cuckoo. Blanchard’s Metes and Bounds takes on a tall order to describe the challenges and risks of latter life, and fills it marvellously with wit and humour.
Matthew Brennan’s The End of the Road, is filled with many autumn and winter scenes. However, the timeline of his book’s settings is somewhat broader including poems about youth, education, historical figures, marriage, divorce, a second relationship, and retirement.
The book is divided into four sections with no titles, but just numbers. Section 1 has scenes from youth related to family history, memories of one’s father and grandfather, parties, a first kiss, ice skating, and student days in London. Section 2 is a historical section of major and minor historical figures that go back further than the poet’s own life, from the poet’s own town in Missouri and Europe. These include historical sketches of a bordello owner in ‘Madame Edith Brown, Proprietor’, two portraits of washed-up baseball players in ‘Mordecai Three Finger Brown’ who complain ‘the co-eds and their crew-cut beaus don’t know / who I once was and would not care a lick’ and an older, alcoholic, motivational speaker in ‘Mickey Mantle’s Nightmare’ ‘slamming them / like strikes throughout a Sunday doubleheader’ whose ‘legs won’t move / like marble monuments’. Even farther back in time is ‘Haydn Unbound’, a dramatic monologue whose subject describes Esterhazy Palace as ‘a beautiful backwater’, his escape from bad ‘marriage / to one who cannot love will leave a husband / halfway to his grave.’ and how ‘At fifty-eight’ he hopes to be welcomed in London as Handel was.
Section 3 has poems about Brennan’s later youth, early college years, and first marriage and divorce. Most are set in autumnal and winter scenes: a relationship ending with a removal in ‘314 East 25th St., on January 1st’ and another auspicious, unexpected, sudden overnight snowfall in ‘Two Snowfalls, Twenty Years Apart’ demarcating two sudden changes in his life ‘plotting new tracks in space no longer known.’ It is in this section in ‘Lambeth Bridge, Sunrise, 1991’, that the poet, four years divorced, finally ‘let(s) go of my ring, dropping it / into the glittering River Thames’ at the point where he originally proposed. As a native Midwesterner, I recognize the landscape and the deep overnight snowfalls that hold back or completely still traffic and other human activity and allow time for deep reflection. It’s also reflected in ‘the skyline of Chicago’ in ‘Sitting on a Sand Dune’ in which the poet celebrates a new love, who lives in ‘The Inner-City Apartment House’ with ‘a late-model Caddy with tires flat upon the pavement….(who) live(s) on the fourth floor and keeps the curtains closed. / Landscapes by Lorrain, Corot, and Winslow Homer / Make your walls a glimmering green, ’.
In Section 4, the poet seems to be rejuvenated in the autumn of his life. He visits or returns to the Haydnsaal ‘At the Esterhazy Palace, Twilight’ or attends ‘A Dinner Party’ while in ‘Savoring’ enjoying autumnal pleasures, … ‘the wine, its garnet brimming / full-blooded, like leaves still holding on.’ This section includes two, very fine poems previously published by AQ: ‘The Hang Glider’ and ‘Old Trees in the Woods’ the first perhaps reflecting the poet’s regained lust for life and the second, with its accompanying epithet, ‘doomed to rezoning’ emphasizing the difficult ecology of hanging onto it. In The End of the Road’s terminal, title poem, the poet opines: ‘Now that I’m here, it went so fast’. I’ve recently heard similar resigned complaints from my newly-senior cohorts. Where did it all go, indeed! AQ