U. of Illinois Press 2007
Reviewed by Hansa Bergwall
Born & Born Again
Imagine a man in the subway who removes his shirt and starts picking a scab. Would you look the other way? I would, but I think Stephen Cramer would watch and find an uncomfortable beauty about the scene. He writes with uncommon courage. His new book Tongue & Groove has poems of the sublime and the ugly. This collection builds on his first book, Shiva’s Drum, but Cramer owns his style more boldly. This book distinguishes itself with an earnest voice. He approaches even unorthodox subjects with the mindfulness of a Buddhist monk.
Maybe I’ve been reading the wrong books, but a lot of poets writing today favor the ironic or cynical over the earnest. Few have the courage to write a love poem without hurt, or irony. Cramer’s “Glaciers” is a forthright celebration of love. He sets the scene as a hike over a landscape and comments on how an ice age has changed that landscape. With this long view of time and shape he cuts to a heady and thrilling sentiment of love:
before we begin, you must know:
I’m awkward with a hammer
& my right angles slope
even with a T-square, the level’s lime-
green bubbles forever misaligned.
love, only now I’m learning
the ways of lasting construction:
dovetail, double tongue & groove,
& you don’t need a hammer
to build what we’re building.
What steers us, unseen
but solid as bedrock?
Let’s make our move
now. In my chest I can feel
a billion trembling wings
veering at once.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up the first time I read this poem. He constructs his tingling moments out of a little wildness, philosophy, and narrative. He can be earnest because he is never cliché.
Cramer also chooses the subject of the outcast as his impetus to poetic realization in several poems. Even though these outcasts appear in public, his attentive description of them can feel voyeuristic. Doesn’t he know the polite thing to do is look away and ignore? His insistence that the reader look with him made me uncomfortable at times, but I was always grateful afterward. In “Strings” he chooses a crazy and dirty man who has a ukulele with no strings which he strums until his fingers bleed. Cramer uses this figure to reflect on Buddhist ideas of reincarnation:
…because on these streets
don’t even think about looking
for a next life—Sweetheart,
you ain’t gonna get it—
& all you can do is prepare
to be astonished out of your body
& into another’s, to feel your way
into something as remote
as the grayed & toiling flesh
still grinding away at that scored
& barren wood—phantom
strings & phantom resonance.
…
This rebirth through empathy re-imagines reincarnation and the Buddhist worldview. It makes the idea of becoming other more accessible to a skeptical 21st century mind while honoring the idea of the sacred. The music of the language, the realist world and the imaginative philosophy come together elegantly. Poetry may not be a vehicle for rhetorical argument, but it can reveal an image of truth. This poem reveals a beautiful way of imagining empathy.
A current political world can be tricky to write about. Maybe that is because the liberal and conservative talking points frame our thinking so well that it is difficult to write a fresh view. When Cramer takes up the challenge in “Fuel,” he mostly succeeds. In the poem, he imagines a bus, with an eagle on its side that runs on blood, types O, A and B. The bus runs on newscasters, media, and 2 am knocks on the door. He makes our nation feel like a late-night rerun of the film “Speed,” where Keanu Reeves cannot slow the bus below 50 mph or it will explode. He ends it with a call to slow down:
… 12 ton bus
with an eagle on its side
& this isn’t my stop
but I’m getting off
because I don’t know about you
but I can walk from here.
Any political poem runs the risk of alienating a reader who disagrees. Yet as a caricature this poem reveals some truth by distorting it. The poem succeeds because the image rings true, even if the framing and proscription are debatable.
Cramer crafts his poetry well and a jazz sensibility goes from soft to brassy. He seems to intuitively arrive at insights through his work and he shares them. These insights always come from paying very close attention to the lover, to the homeless man, to war. He earns each big thought. His tone is earnest and appealing. I recommend reading this book.
--March 24, 2008
Also by Stephen Cramer:
Shiva's Drum
