Copper Canyon 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson
All That We See or Seem
If you’re wondering what a “pajamaist” is I can tell you for sure that it is a kind of grand metaphor; it has to be, as Matthew Zapruder makes the following important disclosure early on in the titular poem:
When I sleep I don’t wear pajamas. I prefer to sleep naked,
and thrash the bedsheets around until they wrap me in a
protective covering with only my head and feet exposed.
For Zapruder the entrance to a poem is never problematic. He knows how to engage—an essential poetic tool that even some “essential” writers lack. Zapruder knows how to get into a poem and to bring the reader with him. The book title alone hooks the reader and we're compelled to read on to find out more. While we're not always rewarded with clear-cut answers, the first poem in the book, “Dream Job,” provides excellent opening lines that seem fitting for a pajamaist:
Today abstracted
as a glass of milk
forgotten by a kid who went
into this interminable
rain to play…
A dreamlike mood is set, already we’re mixed up in dreamlike imagery, an unstable world in which we can be sure of nothing but Zapruder’s “interminable.” “The Pajamaist,” we learn later in the book, is the title of a novel the poet writes in a dream; the above lines are a perfect introduction to a book in which everyone suffers, in which dreaming, reality, and the imagination are the blurred antidote to that suffering.
Sometimes Zapruder engages by asking questions of the reader, and of a mysterious companion he is writing to or about. This tactic is employed throughout “Twenty Poems for Noelle,” a poem in twenty untitled sections that invoke “Noelle” as an anchor for the collection. Early in the book, “First Time, Long Time” begins:
Those big oily birds cleaning
their feathers on the roof,
what are they called?
I have no idea, but I sure as hell want to find out too. Again though, the poem becomes less about identifying a specific genus of bird; it presents a meditative, cautious narrator, perplexed by everything surrounding him. The poem seeks to formulate a new perspective, a dream-like lens through which to view the earth.
“Canada” provides yet another example of a poem successfully and beautifully launched. “By Canada I have always been fascinated. / All that snow and acquiescing.” The second line here is perhaps the most striking in the book and certainly my personal favorite, a perfect synthesis of sound and significance. Zapruder repeats the word Canada several times throughout the poem. Repetition can be a slippery slope that frustrates the reader with its sentimentality; Zapruder manages to romanticize it in a satisfying way:
In Canada the leaves are falling.
When they do each one rustles
maybe to the white-tailed deer
of sadness…
Zapruder has a way of working up to endings that are on the brink of falling victim to the trap of sentimentality, but rather achieve a small finality feeling more like an inevitability than an engineered tearjerker.
Parts two and three of the book—“Twenty Poems for Noelle” and “The Pajamaist,” respectively—focus on a universal cell of suffering. “Twenty Poems for Noelle” seems identifiable as a post 9-11 mindset. “The Pajamaist” is centered on a dream in which the narrator is writing a novel called “The Pajamaist.” In the novel, a cure for suffering has been discovered: displacing suffering, and hiring the pajamaist to suffer for you.
Though suffering is an obviously large and complex subject (one that some may deem cliché, especially when addressed within a poem) and a cure for suffering is an idealist notion even in a dream, Zapruder’s lengthy title poem is oddly entertaining and simultaneously melancholic. “We just think suffering hurts less in sleep because / we are sleeping.” In this highly imaginative poem there is a pajamaist who works as a “sufferer,” meaning that he lets others transfer their suffering to him using “pajama’s little helper” or a little blue pill so that they may suffer less.
Also there is an investigator that probes a case of odd spikes in suffering graphs that leads him to said pajamaist. I should remind you as well that all of this takes place in a dream that the narrator of the poem (also the pajamaist? Naked poet?) dreams. Ten different types of suffering are aptly identified for us as well, making sure not to leave out “the purely physical.” The notion of using a pill/person to limit suffering makes “The Pajamaist” reminiscent of Don Delillo’s novel White Noise, in which a pill is marketed as a cure for the fear of death; this was for me a positive association, especially when strange levels of government become involved.
Lots of “suffering.” Somehow though the book remains somber while never becoming maudlin. As Zapruder knows how to begin poems, he is also skilled at finishing them, often times on upbeat and inspiring notes. An example of such a brilliant ending is found in “Tonight You’ll Be Able”:
…Ask yourself
what would I do if I knew I could
not fail.
Sounds like fantastic advice, amplified by his pristine enjambment. Zapruder often leaves out many forms of punctuation in his poems which creates a natural feeling of necessity and immediacy. Moreover, Zapruder ends this collection with the idea of new beginnings, opportunities, and possibilities. The positive energy that ends the book is moving and makes clear that anything—a dream, a death, a vision of reality, a moment’s suffering—can be “both breakable and strong.”
Also by Matthew Zapruder:
American Linden
