Scotch Wave of Light

new book of poetry, , is a metaphysical meditation on identity through time and the search for the real amidst ghosts, memories, and illusory images. As in the artful illusions of theatre and movies, to which Klein alludes frequently, lighting can change everything in these poems—here people darken or there is an overwhelming bomb-blast of sunlight.

Love and loss seem to be the fundamental elements from which these poems originate. Klein leaves little, if anything, out of his depictions of the essential facets of a certain kind of writer’s life, the trials of a childhood filled with shame and pain, its fair share of neglect, and the realization, even if only for one ghastly instant, that your parents wished you were different from what you are. There is endless questioning of reality and identity; there is the friend with whom you committed the requisite mistake of sex; there is more sex with a true lover; there are the departed, the being haunted, and, always, the daily task and practice—writing—”where you turn the thing like art back into a gift / after it almost kills you” (“Day and paper”).

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Klein’s poems rarely, if ever, embrace the world with a Romantic’s lyricism. Instead they announce themselves with the consonant staccato of a television’s static, the flatlined cadence that could be attributed to a person touched by post-traumatic stress—the speaker analyzes deeply emotional events without emoting, as in his utterly chronological reportage of his brother’s death in the last couplet of his poem “The twin:” “When he was living, we used to dare each other. / I dare you, he said. I dare you. And then, he died.”

It is also a distinctly post-9/11 psyche that admits the attack on the World Trade Center wasn’t like the movies and it wasn’t real (“2001”). The same psyche is wide-awake to the ongoing economic catastrophe; it intertwines childhood neglect with the enduring and ubiquitous financial strain, “The way [my father] loves me is like the way you remember money—owing / it to someone” (“The ranges”). As much as any conscientious, sensitive person prone to guilt can do, the speaker feels around for someone who we can hold in part responsible for the way we are now; he points to the “governments looking past faces into the fire / of maps on the long table” (“Not light’s version”) and to our fathers littering the ground with “false clues” which they used to confuse us and hide behind (“The ranges”).

The matter-of-fact tone and the all-but-absent-lyricism mark this book as of this time—the post-9/11, recession-beaten, warring, and electronically-oversaturated era. Klein speaks for those of us who are trying to decipher between what is real and what is illusion; these poems depict a speaker who is, like many of us today, trying to stay not only alive, but sentient, all the while bearing witness to the current tides of war, financial collapse, and personal loss.

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Klein never separates pain from the love that has “made the air visible” (“The movies”). He envisions scenes of his mother’s tortured life (hung out the window by her heels as a girl, beaten by her husbands, writing a book in her mind), and it’s an act of love. Klein attempts to see his mother rather than impose an image of what he wants to see onto the memory of her. In doing so, he acknowledges the variegation of anyone who is real. Klein’s poems open to full bloom when he engages in this act of love, in seeing another person. The poignancy in the poems “The pact” and “My Brother’s Suitcase” is not sentimental. Klein writes in “My brother’s suitcase,”

The suitcase smells like heat and dust and a little bit of the smell that was left in the room
where he died – that horrifyingly real smell of death and alcohol
and something else – left on this suitcase and on the fancy Cole-Haan wallet
he bought himself one Christmas while he had a cab wait.

He used to tell that story to people because I think it meant he discovered
that his loneliness was also something that generated a sort of kindness.

Even if it was kindness towards himself, he glowed in the back seat of the cab from it.

The matter-of-factness that left earlier poems in the book somewhat brittle, even purposefully inaccessible, becomes a masterfully handled tool of illumination, which Klein uses to look fully at the images of those he loved, those who are now dead. This takes unusual strength and love, as well as a commitment to being a realist. Klein is both a realist about America—we are a country at war and mired in debt—as well as his own reality—he is someone who has suffered and survived the immense losses of his twin brother and his mother. If he is particularly cognizant of the screen images we are all subjected to on a constant basis, it’s because he commits himself to seeing what is real amidst those images: war, loss, and changes brought by time.

This is no movie set: there is the “horrifyingly real smell of death.” And only a son, out of every other being in the world, has the insight to say (in Klein’s level yet devastating voice), “my mother wasn’t finished with her life when she let it go, like a hat in the park” (“The nineties”).

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Klein’s poems set in motion a deluge of questions: do we change, individually, year to year, afternoon to afternoon? Does humanity change, learn? The answers are never definitive, always dual.

Klein suggests that we as individuals do change through time, as when he ruminates,

My mother’s been dead for so long, that I don’t think she’d remember

who I was even if she did come back – if death lets memory be like
time – or covers the ground with new tracks.
My life’s been moving on the ground of each year she’s been dead

and is different than it was when she was coming over for dinner. . .

(“The nineties”).

He asks in the fourth part of the book, “Was America ever the world / we grew up with? Didn’t it stop being that somewhere in the fifties…?” But the poem that follows that one is titled “What war?” and begins, “Some people look into the television into Afghanistan / and say they can’t see anything.” His poems that address death and war beg the question of whether, in fact, humanity ever changes. Klein will not neatly answer any questions for us, but pulls us into the whirlwind of questions about our history and our present situations.

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Klein questions the reality of the people in his life, referring to them as “the living list of characters in the play about my life as it was being lived” (“You”) and proposes that our world is constantly renewing itself, and that we have no choice but to be changed by the reckless tides of time: “The old fear always follows you into the new life. Who will I be?” (“The movies”).

If the waves of time (which may bring death) settle intermittently, they do so when Klein offers brief interludes of ars poetica. In the poem “You,” Klein delivers a comment about a near death experience that is so modest and unadorned it could be overlooked: “I wondered if it was important / to tell people about it.” But the sentence is an articulation of an experience every writer encounters—questioning if anything written down is important enough to share. Such questioning could, if over-indulged, snuff the entire creative gesture; but it is also a necessary editorial voice to listen to, sparingly. If we did not heed that voice in small doses, we would be left with raw heaps of material, which might satisfy some writers, but not Klein. His poems have been pruned, sheared, shaved, and whittled. He has clearly asked himself the question, is this important to tell? This question becomes more important as he considers the relationship between our present situation and the past.

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Identities, in Klein’s book, are amorphous, interchangeable, and at times beguiling—he sees his dead twin brother’s distinct swagger in a reflection of himself. However, despite the shapeshifting and misunderstood identities Klein happens upon, there is a steady, consistent speaker throughout these poems who offers his vantage point of the world and of reels of memories. Readers should cling to this consistent ‘I,’ as anyone would cling to a steady form of consciousness in a world that alters or altogether disappears; like money, people and time are “always falling from our hands” (“The pact”). The ‘I’ is the rope Klein throws to us as we walk hesitatingly, jerkily, through his poems; the ‘I’ becomes an eye that lets us “see in the dark,” buoys us as we float on the “the scotch wave of light” (“A saver”).

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The experience of reading these poems is not an easy, nor a rapturous one. We experience at times “the depressive’s only language: a dead language / the depressive’s temporary cure: the shine on a wave.” If, however, there is rapture in these poems, it comes from the difficulty of them. Klein’s poetry is, then, in keeping with Rilke’s advice to a young poet when he observes, “Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it….”