You Were Born One Time. Quitman Marshall.
Ninety-Six Press, 2014. 70 pages, ISBN: 978-0-9797995-4-6
I take pleasure in some poets for their incredibly beautiful music, while others thrill me with their startling metaphoric leaps. Still others I enjoy for their sheer exuberance, the ability to transform dark material into light, such as Jack Gilbert and this poet: Quitman Marshall. His latest and first full-length collection is You Were Born One Time. It received the South Carolina Poetry Archives Book Prize and was published by Ninety-Six Press in 2014.
There is a deep undercurrent of gratitude in his poetry. There are moments that intrude on speakers and surprise them with beauty or insight. This occurs in such poems as “Civilization,” or “Bagel.” Here is the collection’s concluding poem “Twenty Thousand Sunsets,”
The sun going down
is at one o’clock
from where I am
or where I face,
on a southbound road
going someplace,
a great peach-colored sigh.
And then the streaking,
lines like these
across the abandoned sky,
until the birds move
as they always do,
and I have as much joy
as I’ve ever had
from something never sought
or asked for.
Although not formal, the compressed clarity recalls to mind the poetry of Robert Francis. But the comparison only applies to the occasional poem in Marshall; on the whole his poetry is expansive. Even when the poem is on a small scale, the sense is of something opening up and out. So in every respect this concluding poem and that undercurrent of gratitude should not mislead us: the light this poetry provides is not that of a Pollyanna. The collection also confronts dark issues, societal disparities, such as wealth inequality but with such a light hand, it doesn’t strike one as the cultural criticism it is. So the early poem “Blackbeard” starts innocently enough with a memory:
In St. Augustine once,
two men in buccaneer drag
swayed past my daughters
and “Aaarr”ed so well
the girls still thrill to recall it.
But then the poem diverges into considerations of our reasons for liking pirates, the kind of fantasy they represent but also how the skull and crossbones “codifies our mute contempt for the rich” who
Now colonize his hiding places,
and the beaches where he buried
his relatively minor treasure
are their immense front yards.
So delicately, we are brought to see who the greater pirates are, how the rich pirated the buried treasure of the famed pirate himself. It is not easy to handle such issues without climbing on a soapbox, but that is what Marshall manages here as elsewhere.
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What makes these poems a pleasure to read is that Marshall is not simply a poet of issues, he is a poet of attentive clarities. That is to say, he is deeply aware of the subtleties of inner and outer worlds and of the inadequacies that distract from the real life around us. If, as he says, “It’s my job, this naming,” that naming, to be right, implies focused attention.
Failed metaphors and past times,
they are the rain that continues
while we become rain ourselves
or diamonds, say, dissolving as we slide.
(“You Are”)
Here is the implication of our very nature hinging on the right language, the right name. Without it, we dissolve and lose sight of the reality before us. Though, of course, in time we will do this nonetheless, which makes this into a subtle and wonderful double-entendre. Again, in the conclusion of “Walk Across the Yard,”
. . . the bees visit them one-by-one
like the wandering merchants
we might remember as real
even as we lose ourselves in the high
ringing of cicadas or the flights
of birds who travel farther
and with far more reason than us.
Maybe we forget even why,
with all there is and we aren’t,
we’ve walked across the yard.
Here attentiveness to the beauty of life leads to a kind of self-forgetfulness, a transcendence. This is another of those moments that surprises us with joy and points toward the collection’s final poem. But there is also implied in all that “we aren’t,” everything that pulls us away, that blinds us or which we blind ourselves with. So there is always a sense of things lurking, both for good and for ill. Everything is about to break upon us: the moments of reprieve and the distractions that obscure the joys and realities we could discover. The wrestling between these two extremes constitutes the journey of the collection. However, unlike many poetry collections today that bask in uncertainties, this one ends on an unequivocally redemptive moment, those “Twenty Thousand Sunsets.”
The style throughout is balanced. It doesn’t way heavily in any direction but provides both the pleasure of music and the clarity of insight. So one finds both delectable phrasings like “incendiary symmetry” or “The blue pluff mud of low tide,” but also a concluding line like “What is the use of flight?” All this adds up to a collection that one finishes feeling grateful for having read and a collection one makes sure to find a permanent place for on the shelves.
