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]
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