For example, in “My Brotherʼs Hands, 1964,” Brown carries us from an odd, awkward moment at a family picnic—when his elder brother, a doctor, pets a harmless rat snake who wanders into the party—to the horrors of Vietnam. The linking event is the tragic, needless death of the snake at the hands of children coarsened by religious superstition: “[B]ut the boys from the Baptist picnic found it first, / and steeped in their parentsʼ lore, / stoned it into oblivion.” The final stanza brings snake, boys, God and war together in an exquisite, unforced image: “At night I dreamed the physicianʼs hands / holding a serpentine staff instead / of a crucifix, blessing the foreheads / of boys he couldnʼt save.” The poem is a nearly perfect portrayal of the way our private memories resonate against reality. It maps the psychic space in which the individual meets ideas and events beyond his immediate experience.
Thatʼs the space where politics are born, and there is a political element—though never a polemical one—in these poems. Brown insists, above all, on the necessity of connection, as in the witty “Children Who Love Holes,” a paean to pierced and tattooed youth who make their bodies a mirror of their tortured planet: “The children who love holes / shave their heads like strip mines, / like devastated rain forests, / or they shape their hair into spikes that / poke the sky like urban landscapes.” Here, as in all 31 of the poems in Tatters, Brown pushes the reader, deftly but firmly, to see what joins the contents of the human heart to the state of its world.
This ability to shift focus from the ephemeral detail to the big picture is complemented by Brownʼs gift for finding humor, and even sweetness, in grim realities. Heʼs never saccharine, and he doesnʼt soften the bad news with jokes. Instead, he walks an ironic tightrope, creating a pleasurable tension for the reader as he teeters alternately toward the dark and the light, as in “Pigeon,” a wry look at the homeless.The undersides of bridges speak pigeon.Thatʼs why the homeless camp there,to learn the language. Itʼs a holisticprogram. They eat and sleep togetherand rarely talk to outsiders, exceptto bum a quarter, a dollar if theyʼrelucky. Itʼs hard to get study grantsor government loans, pigeons not beingin much demand, pigeons, themselves,uncertified.…
That concrete-to-conceptual leap—from the visual image of the bridgesʼ inhabitants to the existential parallels between them—happens again and again in Tatters. In the collectionʼs title poem, Brown writes, “Much has been said about the toll / images take upon the mind and body....” He might well be referring to his own work, which is concerned above all with the way perceptions of the world trigger an interior response, and how that response in turn causes us to act within the world. The poems in this collection are deceptively simple—mostly free verse, composed of simple language and thoroughly ordinary images. Their genius lies in the way Brown uses such homely tools to excavate a delicate, usually hidden, place in the psyche where observation meets emotion, where feeling meets action.
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