'Grave By the Lake' by Taneum Bambrick

I was first alerted to Taneum Bambrick’s debut collection, Vantage — 2019 winner of The American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and yet another of Copper Canyon Press’s beautifully arranged books — by tweeted recommendation from another excellent poet, Natalie Eilbert. Eilbert valorises the book for having ‘thrown me out of bed and kicked the brown lake out of me’: a canny bit of imaging in itself, where ‘brown lake’ is both uncomplicated and suggestive and where the verb is the right kind of wrong. The brown lake is polluted, rusted, stained rotten with death and yet alive with decay. Do we all have brown lakes inside us? Probably, from time to time. How cleansing, how lightening, to have them kicked out, flushed out.

The phrase also aligns well with the world of the book. In Vantage, Taneum Bambrick (what I wouldn’t give to have had a poet’s name so gorgeous) spends her poems scouting out and clearing — dredging — garbage. According to CCP’s gloss on their website, the book is ‘a fictionalized account of the poet’s real experiences working as the only woman on a six-person garbage crew around the reservoirs of two massive dams’. The academic in me salivates at the compressive promise of that description.

You know people often talk about coming across books they wish they’d written themselves, and with any luck that feeling doesn’t stir envy or stultify but rather inspires, and breeds admiration. Vantage isn’t quite like that, at least not for me. It’s not a book I wish I’d written but a book I know I never would have been able to write. This is true of so many of my favourite recent books of poetry. And I’m glad for that. No really.

Eilbert’s image, it turns out, prefigures the particular poem I have in front of me. Its title is ‘Grave By the Lake’.

Jim was like a dad. He told me to stay,

I jumped from the truck. Followed to a plastic

tub in the gravel lot. Its opening white

and fanned as dead leaves. Backlit,

we could see the case held a body. We gloved

our noses. It burned to breathe, like ice in your nose

or inhaling chlorine. Jim crouched beside it,

some pit mix. A pet left there meant no money

to cremate. No yard to bury in. We lifted

the tub. Hands under both sides. Top wedged

with my chin. I could see his body

had been stuffed to fit, as if placing him

in a box made up for his abandonment.

Digging a grave requires a permit.

Our company provided a dumpster

for carcasses. Half a mile from headquarters,

downwind. There was what we had to do

with the dog and what Jim knew I wanted.

He turned to me, exhaled, drove away from the dam.

We found a field without security cameras

and lugged the mutt out. Fingers cut

through grass. We dropped the box in a shallow hole.

Covered damp dirt with gravel. Projecting

what the family would have wanted,

we said a few words. Unclipped and hung nearby

his heart-shaped tag. Jim was a dad, he knew

to set a flowery weed. Those were the days

he made work light for me. Said if someone were here

with his daughter — standing by the flat

water, old blood on her baseball hat —

he would want him to tell her not to come back.

Last year, for various reasons, I found myself frequently in the company of what you could call ‘found-body poems’: poems that centre around or are born out of encountering the body of a dead animal. My particular focus was on birds and, once you’re looking for them, it seems that every poet has at least one dead bird poem. I have one, resolutely unpublished (and I told myself, never again). It’s a trope, if not a cliché, and The Onion once captured the basic point of it just as well as anybody else ever did: ‘Bird Reflects On Frailty, Impermanence Of Life After Finding Dead Human On Sidewalk’. I don’t mean to suggest that dead bird poems are hacky: I love them, I need more of them. If this be poetry, give us increase of it. But it has that same flavour of something you see too often, and you might roll your eyes when you do — as you might when reading stanzas that start ‘Listen:’, or read a 600-word review that dares to use the verb limn.

In her introduction to Vantage, Sharon Olds praises the collection for somehow doing without metaphor: ‘Parts of its freight’, writes Olds, ‘has to do with ecological devastation, told with no voluptuous sentiment. Not “told” so much as seen — the ferocious images not metaphor but reality. Not ideas but things’. This is so commonplace a means of praise that it is easy to forgive Olds for resorting to it: she echoes Wallace Stevens, probably on purpose, with his ‘Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself’, and there’s a hint, too, of ‘A poem should not mean / But be’. There are plenty of ways to take this rhetoric: as a hector against heavy allegorising, as a call for concrete images over abstract ones, as fidelity to the real (whether such a thing is noble or excessive or misguided or not, depending on how you’d see it).¹ It’s of a piece with the strange literary history of anti-writing sentiment, wherein the best writing is that which in some sense hasn’t really been written. It’s nonsensical to suggest that the poems of Vantage are things seen and not told, and the whole interplay between seeing and telling is itself profoundly metaphorical, and 'ferocious images' is itself a ferociously figurative image. Language is constituted by metaphor anyway: so why hope to banish it? And good luck writing poetry without it.

But still, for all this, I think I agree with Olds, or at least it is well-taken, at least with reference to this poem. It’s the realest found-body poem I’ve ever read. Somehow.

It starts with a phrase that will be echoed and modified later on: ‘Jim was like a dad’. Jim is a recurring character in Vantage, one of the monosyllabic male members of Bambrick’s garbage crew. Jim first appears in the second poem, ‘Gaps’, which also opens with a nod to his progeniture: ‘You’re easy to me because I have a daughter, Jim said. But you / can’t forget how you look to us. Ex-construction-ex-loggers. / Pushing sixty. You’re a squirrely thing’.  Jim seems to be saying two things at once here, neither of them particularly kind (and the latter not a little sinister). First: You’re easy for me to understand and interact with because I have a daughter who is in some ways like you, but you can’t forget that you look strange and even ridiculous to us in this situation where we belong and where you don’t. Second: I am not tempted by your body because I have a daughter and thereby (only thereby) know to treat young women with respect and not harass them. But you can’t forget how attractive you look to us. The adjective easy is subtle and ironic here, given its usage in sexual spheres and its adjacency to slut-shaming and predatory attitudes: ‘an easy lay’, etc. Jim is saying, or might be saying, that her uneasiness is, for him, untypically easy, and that she should be wary that not all the men among their company will be quite so tolerant and self-resistant.

Despite these unsavoury undertones, Jim’s fatherliness also comes out in kindness and concern. ‘Jim was like a dad’ also means ‘Jim was like a dad to me’, and he is like a dad in this particular moment, cautioning before being immediately disobeyed: ‘He told me to stay, / I jumped from the truck. Followed to a plastic / tub in the gravel lot. Its opening white’. Eilbert’s point about Bambrick’s sentences shows here. It took me a while to parse their order and structure. ‘Followed’ has no subject (no direct object either, come to that); initially, I thought the subject was Jim, who has been forced to follow the speaker after he has told her to stay in the truck. Now, though, I think it is the speaker: Jim, then, has jumped out first, warned the speaker to stay, and then she has followed. There are quite a few similar moments in Vantage. It is one of the book’s pleasures. The sentences are somehow more compact and more expansive. Their gaps shrink them down, fit them into lines and stanzas (like the poor, poor dog, whose ‘body / had been stuffed to fit’ into the tub); but they also must be reconstituted, patched up, filled in.

(I like the verb in ‘We gloved / our noses’, as I’m sure you do as well. To glove something is to cover it tight, more or less, and there is no particular reason why we would only glove our hands beyond the fact that, as a body-part, it could do more than most with a second skintight covering. Our bodies are gloved in skin, after all (please, please don’t google degloving); ‘a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles’.²)

The bodily details are, in this poem, extensive and specific. Jim hazards the breed — some pit mix — in terms that manage to evoke the teeming, heterogenous mass grave into which it has been dumped and out of which it will soon be lifted. The narrator, meanwhile, reckons with what such a discovery reveals, or at least implies, about the dog’s life and death: ‘A pet left there meant no money / to cremate. No yard to bury in’. The way these phrases all concatenate from each other is oddly satisfying: even before the line-break, ‘A pet left there meant no money’ already says it all; and ‘no money / to cremate’ not only covers an unaffordable funeral but reinforces both the poverty to hand and the heartbreaking fact that, in this case, the dog’s dignity was not worth paying for (there was, that is, no money to burn).

The family was unable to pay for a cremation, and they did not own a yard where they might have buried him for free. The speaker is sympathetic but also moved enough to put things right, and she understands that there are impediments to the dog’s dignity even now. ‘Digging a grave requires a permit. / Our company provided a dumpster / for carcasses. Half a mile from headquarters, / downwind. There was what we had to do / with the dog and what Jim knew I wanted’. This is perfectly direct — while also being euphemistic — but no less devastating for that, and not without its subtleties. ‘There was what we had to do’ of course indicates that, in this line of work, where dead animals are a common enough problem that a particular dumpster has been earmarked for them, the speaker and her colleague are expected to follow a certain protocol. But taking the body there is never actually specified as ‘what we had to do’; grammatically, ‘what Jim knew I wanted’ is just as viable a candidate for ‘what we had to do’. Both are just ‘there’, in the air between the two garbage-collectors.

At any rate, what happens is that Jim and the speaker find somewhere clandestine and cameraless where they can bury the dog. The poem drops its euphemisms almost straight away and devolves into harsher, heavier, sharper verbs and nouns: ‘[we] lugged the mutt out. Fingers cut / through grass’. The verbs, again, are excellent: the image of using fingers as tools for cutting is horrible, in a brilliant way, and the verb is rather more evocative than, for instance, scraping or digging or rooting. Fingers are blunt, fleshy things, far more suited to being cut (something this usage also allows for) than to cutting. Even if the nails are in play.

Jim’s being a dad crops up again, but this time it is a fact and not a set of behaviours. ‘Jim was a dad, he knew / to set a flowery weed’. I wouldn’t have known to do that — I wouldn’t have known that a weed could or should be distinguished between flowery and non-flowery.³ The act or even the concept of ‘set[ting] a flowery weed’ is so ripely suggestive, so thick with metaphor, that I don’t even know where to begin with it. Or rather end with it. In more practical terms, a flowery weed will, presumably, obscure the site of the illicit grave better than a non-flowery one. It will also have a better chance of beautifying the site, of laying the ground for diverse and pleasant growth.

---

¹ I’m not entirely sure, but I think the phrase ‘fidelity to the real’ is either verbatim or very close to something a friend of mine once said to me regarding somebody else’s strained comments on some of her own poems. After she said it, I wrote the phrase, or whatever the phrase actually was, on my hand—thinking, yup, that’s the tea, that’ll come in handy.

² Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 3. For the full famous first paragraph (and the second):

I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy in suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.

³ Googling ‘flowering weed’, incidentally, is not very illuminating for this poem, for reasons that are perhaps obvious. ['flowering weeds', plural, is what you want—I'm honestly surprised by how sensitive Google is to the s in this case]

'Suggested Donation' by Heather Christle

Usually I write about single poems that have for one reason or another come under my nose. My nose, as a rule, is discerning and yet generous. Easy to please and welcoming of new scents. Somewhat short and rounded. Not especially attractive. Befreckled. No stranger to bloodening but no great friend to it either.

The poems are often enough by poets I already know, at least a little, but the poems tend to arrive unchaperoned, as it were. In this case, however, I have set myself the possibly unlovely task of choosing: I know, that is, who the poet will be — but I don’t yet know which poem it will be.

Heather Christle (pronounced crystal — a poet’s name if ever there was one) is a real favourite of mine. Reading a new poem of hers often makes me feel giddy. It’s somewhat rare to feel as though you could easily identify a poem’s poet if the name is not supplied (some poets, it's true, you can recognise from shape alone, like the silhouette of a beloved), and I’m not sure I would really be able to do pick out one of Christle's under exam conditions (or in I A Richards’s class), but there does seem to be something distinctive about her work, although I’m not sure I could name this something, at least not in concrete or intelligible terms. She is, at any rate, one of the slickest, funniest, heartiest poets I know. She is also (un)cannily consistent: she manages on every page to make me ache.

Her forthcoming The Crying Book has been so generously and ingenuously marketed (it’s the wrong word: so it’s the right word) by Christle on her Twitter account that I can’t really remember ever having been so excited for a publication date. It looks fucking great — I believe that, as per Christle’s tweet, the design owes itself to Nicole Caputo, Catapult’s Art Director ¹ — and it seems to me, from my expectant perspective, one of those rare books that will only spill out more, when it is time, than the glories it has already promised and catalogued.

So. A poem. In the end, it wasn’t difficult to choose. I could have gone with anything from Heliopause, which is the only full collection of Christle’s I have actually as yet bought;² but I really cannot stop thinking about the following poem, which appeared in the hundredth and final issue of FIELD and which Christle presented to us, post-publication, on Twitter. The title is ‘Suggested Donation’.

In the morning I drink

coffee until I can see

a way to love life

again. It’s ok, there’s

no difference between

flying and thinking

you’re flying until

you land. Somehow

I own like six nail clippers

and I honestly can’t

remember ever buying

even one. My sister

came to visit and

saw them in a small

wooden bowl. I

heard her laughing in

the bathroom. I hope

she never dies. There’s

no harm in hoping

until you land.

The deer are awake.

Is one pregnant?

If they kept diaries

the first entry would

read: Was born

Was licked

Tried walking

Then they’d walk

away and no second

entry would ever exist.

I run the deer’s

archive. It’s very

light work. Visitors

must surrender

their belongings.

Surrender to me

your beautiful shirt.

I have come to love slender poems, such as this, where every line threatens to break, and often does, as soon as only two or three feet have been taken. As a reader looking for pleasure first of all, I have to admire the deftness and confidence with which Christie slices her lines so short. As a more critically minded reader, or rather a reader on his first or fifth or fiftieth return, what delights me is the high concentration (how sweet and tart) of additional or alternative meanings which, it seems to me, could not have been brought about by any means other than a line break, nor (ipso facto) by any art other than poetry — with its characteristic tension between sight and sound. I can’t imagine a serious person end-stopping while reading this aloud, but then I cringe, generally, at readers who leave a pious pause at the end of every line, who don’t seem to have developed the simple, necessary dexterity of holding onto the syntax of a clause or sentence while it skips from step to step down a poem. I do think that uniform, syntax-cleaving end-stopping can work, but it really depends on the poem. Philip Larkin, who didn’t quite contend that poems should never be read aloud, felt that so much is lost when you hear a poem without being able to see it on the page. It’s hard to disagree.³

An example, and then several more. The very first line of this poem is, given the poem's overall tone, a wry little joke, a benevolent gotcha: ‘In the morning I drink’. It’s curious — although it does make a certain euphemistic sense — that the standalone English construction ‘I drink’, wherein drink is (as yet) an intransitive verb, only ever means ‘I drink alcohol’, and, in fact, quite often means 'I have something of a drinking problem'. The poem thus opens with an apparently troubling admission that the speaker drinks alcohol in the morning. Of course, this is speedily dispelled by the object (‘coffee’) ’round the corner, and I don't think we are to worry too much about the speaker's habits; but, if you were hearing this poem read aloud, you wouldn’t even notice that it had begun with an altogether different order of admission. (Unless, of course, the reader had left a pause or dropped a wink between drink and coffee — which I suppose would be a legitimate way to read it, if not the choice I would make.)

It’s kind of an open secret in poetry, modern poetry in particular, that we can do an awful lot with line breaks as far as the creation or suggestion of meaning. They’re almost a bone thrown to interpreters on the prowl for fruitful ambiguity. If you’re struggling to make something of a poem, look to the breaks, see if you might turn one phrase into two: the more potentially contradictory, the better. (Well.) And if you look down the length of this poem, you can see that almost every line does some version of this, of making two by splitting one, of birthing-by-severance. ‘I drink / coffee until I can see’ is distinct, syntactically and semantically, from ‘I drink / coffee until I can see / a way to love life’, which in turn is distinct from ‘I drink / coffee until I can see / a way to love life / again’. ‘It’s ok, there’s / no difference between / flying and thinking’ is distinct from ‘It’s ok, there’s / no difference between / flying and thinking / you’re flying’, which, again — you get it. I don’t at all mean to suggest that this is some kind of trick or crutch on the poet’s part. This is the very stuff of poetry, and Christle does it better than anyone. ‘All poetry is fragment’, Heather McHugh has written: ‘it is shaped by its breakages, at every turn’.⁴ Line breaks, of course, are not the only kind of breakage, or the only kind of turn, but they are perhaps paramount.

Is there really no difference between / flying and thinking / you’re flying until / you land? Flying and landing are two parts of a binary here, and it’s not clear which one is the better state to be in. Flying could be all things good — success, confidence, alertness, productivity, unbounded vision — and landing could be, in turn, stagnancy, depression, anxiety. Death. Andrew Solomon has written about the curiously ad hoc or ad lib nature of effective treatments for depression which, if you are lucky, can demonstrate that there is indeed no difference between flying and thinking you’re flying (italics mine):

If you have cancer and try an exotic treatment and think you are better, you may well be wrong. If you have depression and try an exotic treatment and think you are better, then you are better. Depression is a disease of thought process and emotions, and if something changes your thought processes and emotions in the correct direction, that qualifies as recovery. Frankly, I think that the best treatment for depression is belief, which is in itself far more essential than what you believe in. If you really truly believe that you can relieve your depression by standing on your head and spitting nickels for an hour every afternoon, it is likely that this incommodious activity will do you tremendous good.⁵

Landing isn’t necessarily cognate with depression, and flying might not be depression's opposite (whatever the fuck that is). There’s scarce little in the poem to hang this on. It could, indeed, be inverted: flying, perhaps, is being adrift, unanchored, solitary, powerless, ethereal, directionless, unsafe. And landing everything other, or opposite. But whichever side flying takes, at least what it has over landing is that the mind might have the power to make it real even if you never leave the ground.

The most beautiful break in this poem is one of the most beautiful I have ever encountered. Again, it involves an initially intransitive verb which immediately then takes on an object. Without a subject it is, perhaps, already poignant: ‘I hope’. But then — but then! — ‘I hope she / never dies’. This thought⁶ is prompted, clearly enough, by the sound of her sister’s laughter, and it is at once surprising and inevitable. 'I hope / she never dies' sounds to me like a blissful sigh — that loveliest of oxymora. It’s an impossible hope, obviously, at least in one sense. But it is neither absurd nor unwarranted. It is exactly what we think, I think, when we hear the laughter of those we love.

‘There’s / no harm in hoping / until you land’, after all, in which case flying is living and landing is death. There are, however, two different ways of reading this. One: there’s no harm in hoping until you land — but thereafter there is harm in hoping. Or two: everything is over when you land anyway, so why not hope for the duration of the flight. Hoping doesn’t have to be desperate or brave or reckless or last-ditch: it can be mild, or curious, or idle, or wistful.

Both because I don’t have the energy and can’t bear to leave too much unaddressed, I will just append a few more or less unordered observations about the poem after it turns from sisters and nail clippers to deer. It evokes something of the speedy maturation of many animals, I think — I have kittens in mind — that the imagined diary of the deer is abandoned so quickly. The first two entries are passive, objectless ('Was born / Was licked') and, once the active voice, although still somewhat objectless (‘Tried walking’), has taken hold, the deer is off on its independent way. The singular deer is representative: ‘no second / entry would ever exist’, not for any deer.

And then the tremendous good joke of maintaining an archive for the single-entry journal of a single (note the apostrophe’s position) deer. I don’t know what to make of it. It is a wordless bubble of joy in my heart. And then, sweet Jesus, the end. ‘Surrender to me’, first of all. But not your self: only ‘[s]urrender to me / your beautiful shirt’. I have nothing to say about this. Is there some strange echo of ‘render unto Caesar’? Maybe. Probably not. This poem is so fucking good.

[edit — or I Guess Rather Addendum]: I forgot to mention the title! And the nail clippers! The clippers feel to me almost like a stand-up bit, a minor observation that seems universal as soon as it’s been said. I too can’t remember ever buying nail clippers, although I probably own more like two or three instead of six. But what I also love about this detail, this image, is that all the clippers have been grouped together in a bowl. It sounds as though the speaker, tidying her bathroom ahead of a visit from her sister, unearthed all six, realised there was no point throwing any of them out — some clippers are sharper or perhaps less rusted than others, some are for children, some are for cats, but they’re all basically the same, so why would you single out one or two to be kept or displayed if you had six? — and dumped them all into the same bowl. It’s both an understandable thing to have done and something which, if I noticed it in a friend’s or a relative’s bathroom, I would almost certainly laugh at. 

---

¹ Oddly enough, for me, a couple of months after I wrote this post, I was flicking through Alexander Nehemas's On Friendship, a book I've owned for a good year or so. The jacket design is credited to somebody whose name I was sure I recognised — and yes, I was right: it is Nicole Caputo. It's a different publisher, and you wouldn't assume that the person who designed The Crying Book also designed On Friendship, which, you can see, features a thematically appropriate visual pun: a pair of pears, one resting its head(?) on the other's shoulder(?).

² Since writing this post, I have bought another of Christle's collections: The Trees, The Trees, which will be published in the UK in October 2019 and which you can pre-order here. Je suis, as the French say, excited.

³ Especially if you look at the fuller (and dispiritingly gendered) expression of his attitude towards ‘spoken poetry’. From the New Statesman, 02 February 1962 (hmm: that date is both Joyce’s 80^th birthday and the 40^th anniversary of the full publication of Ulysses, which, you know — anyway):

The question remains, though: is spoken poetry — poems read by their authors in a way that lets us listen to them without distraction — a good thing? Is it better than reading? I still can’t believe it is. True, one actually hears the rough mouth-music of vowels and consonants and all that, but he is a poor reader who cannot imagine that for himself. It prohibits skipping, perhaps, but equally allows your mind to wander. And if the poem is unfamiliar, how much harder it is to grasp without its punctuation, stanza-shape, and knowing how far one is from the end! […]

Is spoken poetry a bad thing, then — a gimmick of the professor just back from America, a toy for the tired schoolteacher, a way of meeting girls? No, equally strongly. Though I remain convinced that the reader’s first encounter with the poem must be a silent, active one, an absorption of spelling and stanza-arrangement as much as paraphrasable meaning and corrective historical knowledge, there comes a moment with any poem we have really taken to ourselves when we want to hear its author read it. We want to confirm our conviction that he would quicken the pace here, throw away an irony there, or perhaps our curiosity is just for what his voice can add, something we cannot define until we hear it. Well, for such ages as succeed our own this will be possible in the case of poets writing after 1930, and knowledge of them will be richer in consequence.

⁴ Heather McHugh, ‘Broken English: What We Make of Fragments’, in Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1999), p. 75. I was first made aware of McHugh, and of this quotation in particular, by a lecture given by Sarah Howe while she was at Harvard. See 4.59 in the video.

⁵ Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Anatomy of Depression (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 137.

⁶ [Originally, I had the following all inside two parenthetical dashes; my inner editor knew it had to move or go, but I couldn't be sure where to put it and still wanted to preserve it] And it seems to me a thought: it sounds to me like exactly the kind of thing Christle might well have thought, in a flash, while her sister was visiting; without wanting to fawn over origins too much, or believe too strongly in my own supposing, I can imagine that this very real moment could have been the poem's first pulse or throb for Christle, one of those incidents of overhearing or sidelong seeing by which you know, suddenly, haply, that a poem has just been born.