Books
LATE WINTER
By Bill Brown (Iris Press, 143 pp., $16)
Bill Brown is not the sort of poet who feels the need to don a new set of literary clothes with every outing. Many contemporary poets, unsure of their audience and eager for academic respect, dedicate each new collection to a different Big Idea or try to impose an overarching narrative on poems that could happily live discrete lives. This approach to poetry carries a whiff of hucksterism, and if there’s one thing Brown is not, it’s a huckster. He’s an earnest wordsmith who assumes readers share his respect for the poem itself, sans marketing concept. Late Winter, his seventh collection, brings together more than 60 poems yoked only by the singular voice and perspective of a poet examining his life just past its midpoint.
Earnest Goes to Print Bill Brown
For most of us, middle age is marked by the ascendance of memory in our interior lives, and Brown is no exception. A number of the verses are structured around an instance of remembering, as in “Lake Isle of Tennessee”: I drop the bottled water that I found in the faculty lounge and recall a tin cup / and Grandmilt’s spring. The poem recalls one of those moments in childhood when a place and a feeling are imprinted together in the mind for a lifetime. It’s also an explicit homage to Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” and so it melds Brown’s passionate literary life and his private biography, capturing the seamless continuum of reverie.
The indulgence of memory inevitably leads to elegy, and Late Winter includes several verses in that mode. Actually, Brown nods to the dead in most of the poems, and devotes one of the five segments of the collection to “Losses.” He speaks of doomed friends, war dead and, most often, his parents. The remembrance of dead parents is an inescapable, and badly worn, theme of contemporary American poetry. Brown, however, does a masterful job with it in a couple of poems, especially “My Father Made Love”:
My father made love to failure.
The curve of his lips turned down
in timid sorrow, to men whose
promises meant little
whose
greed made love to nothing.
Brown recites a litany of his father’s passions, both joyful and sad. The poem is a celebration of the man and avoids the sentiment, pity and childish disappointment that ruin a lot of Mommy and Daddy poems.
For all his concern with the past in Late Winter, the social conscience that has often marked Brown’s work is very much alive in this collection. The ills of our day, especially the war in Iraq, make cameo appearances even in the poems that are memory-driven. These tossed-in references sometimes seem intrusive, too blunt in their anger. Pure engagement with imagery is the core of poetic sensibility, and that engagement tends to crumble in the face of editorializing.
In the small clutch of overtly antiwar poems here, for example, the one that works best is “The Body Washer, Iraq 2006,” in which Brown avoids explicit expressions of outrage and guilt, and simply describes the thoughts of an Iraqi woman: “At night / she still dreams of the mother and child / cauterized into one embrace, purified by fire.” It takes audacity to attempt such an intimate portrayal of someone else’s personal experience of war, but the depiction of one woman’s everyday horror has far more impact on the reader than references to faceless mass bloodshed.
In spite of the presence of such topical drama, however, Late Winter mostly lacks the political edge of Brown’s 2007 collection Tatters. His bitter wit, so wonderfully evoked in gems such as “Pigeon” or “Children Who Love Holes,” is not much in evidence, either. The tone here is altogether more sorrowful, with interspersed moments of gentle humor, as in “The Rubber,” in which the memory of Brown’s adolescent encounter with proof of his parents’ sex life serves as a segue to the scene of his father’s death. The change in tone makes the poems in Late Winter feel more substantial, more like poetry for the long haul through the second half of life. Brown has a mature grasp of voice and imagery in Late Winter well beyond anything in Tatters, displaying a remarkable artistic leap forward for this gifted and prolific writer.
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