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Print This PostIf you’d told me that the ultimate line of a wonderful poem could be, simply, “Doctor Wong,” I would’ve looked at you skeptically. But that’s exactly the case in Matthew Rohrer’s latest collection, Destroyer and Preserver (Wave 2011). I both laughed and felt outfoxed by Rohrer’s nasty knuckleball wit when I read the last line of, “Marque Nùmero Dos.” My laughter elicited an is-there-something-wrong-with-you look from the woman next to me on the plane, but I cared about as much as the clouds outside.
And Destroyer and Preserver is more than witty and strange. These unpretentious lyrics are deft expressions of where the personal meets the political, where the mundane meets the profound—documenting a multivalent poet’s quotidian as his nation wars abroad.
Destroyer and Preserver shares many of the concerns of Rohrer’s earlier works. I was introduced to his poems some years back, when a mentor suggested I read his first collection, A Hummock in the Malookas—which was Mary Oliver’s selection for the National Poetry Series in 1994. I checked the slim volume out from the library and found myself rereading it weekly for the next six months, only returning the book the way that one who’s been drinking coffee every day for years gives up caffeine—with reluctance and anxiety over his rather pointless act of sacrifice. So I bought my own copy. To me, Rohrer’s poetry has been easy to live with, incisive, and sustaining ever since.
In the manners of the sometimes jokey, New York School-y, sometimes cryptic, sometimes surreal poems of prior collections, Destroyer and Preserver offers an assortment of breezily deployed formal variations with thematic interests. In the first piece, “From Mars,” quick enjambments and an absence of punctuation muss up syntax:
We have some sad news
this morning
from Mars
the imagination thinks
in phrases but the universe
is a long sentence
according to our instruments
the oldest songs
are breaking apart
like a puzzle in a basement…
What strikes one immediately as a spoken quality in this diction, familiar in Rohrer’s work, is disrupted in two manners. First, by the poet’s lineation—invoking his agency to ‘break apart’ the ‘long sentence of the universe,’ thus reshuffling how we see the cosmic order and assign meaning to its individuated components—and second by his refusal to obey prose-y conventions of punctuation, et cetera, which allows for a lot of bait-and-switch play from line to line, from idea to idea. These strategies are fairly consistently applied in this collection. Coupled with the statement on the surface of this first poem, we’re at least superficially given a glimpse of Rohrer’s personal cosmos.
Rohrer’s is a cosmos of the mind, of course, in a Stevensian “I am my world” sense. The surprise synaptic leaps in “From Mars” seem to mirror those of the speaker in the poem. This happens again and again in Rohrer’s work—rather like surprise hands pushing us forward or spinning us sideways, he subjects us to his own leaping fixations and associations. The ride is exhilarating, confusing, and thought-provoking at different turns.
In fact, these poems are not so breezily presented, and pay off with a kind of full immersion. “Marque Nùmero Dos” is a great example. Employing similar enjambment to “From Mars,” “Marque Nùmero Dos” is less grand in terms of scope. In this piece, Rohrer documents his own cognitive experience while on the phone with an automated system. Infusing the banal with the reflection of an interesting poet’s consciousness, we readily accept such statements as: “a sunny day / is a sufficient cathedral.” These poems do this again and again—dilating on tedium and infusing it with grander meaning, sharing an experience of our shared world from the point of view of a unique wordsmith’s mental jumble, seemingly effortlessly organized on the page.
The pieces that leap less are no less charming. “Casualties,” for example, is a meditation in the bathroom that demonstrates how the characters of Rohrer’s domestic life inhabit the perspective of these poems:
My son says
are soldiers good or bad?
I say it’s very complicated.He brushes his teeth
with a toothbrush
that looks like a whale.I see his face, his eyes
right in front of mine.
We are drowning togetherin the hold of a ship.
He looks just like me.
The rain slows outside.One cloud turns pink at sunset.
A bomb falls on a house in the desert.
The plane that dropped itglides through another blue
and returns to us
to be washed and put away.
Some readers of contemporary poetry might bridle at Rohrer’s spartan, utilitarian diction, and the lack of political restraint in reference to U.S. bombing of civilians. But just as the wonderful poet Bob Hicok writes in a recent piece of his own, “As I was masturbating, more rainforest disappeared” (from “Life,” in Words for Empty and Words for Full, University of Pittsburg, 2010), Rohrer’s poems document how we as individuals move fluidly between domestic and private concerns, with a sometimes-helpless bemusement about the world around us. Without judgment, and with a seriousness that is either a rendering of reality or an excellent facsimile of Reality, Rohrer’s poems are great examples of such human instants. Thus Destroyer and Preserver is a subtle and entertaining lens through which to view our moment, and well worth your perusal—especially if you enjoyed Rohrer’s previous, fine collections of poems.
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