Review of The Hat City After Men Stopped Wearing Hats, by John Surowiecki, Washington, DC: The Word Works, 2007 (Winner of the 2006 Washington Prize). Reviewed by George Drew.
She says there are holes in the light,
fissures that, opening to the past,
are born to collapse . . .
These lines, from “Mad Song,” are a concise summary of John Surowiecki’s poems:
both their subject matter and their methodology. They also express perfectly how the
poems leave us feeling: as if we have dropped a tab of acid and are experiencing
hallucinatory associations of previously unimaginable dimensions. “All my poems are
brief,” Surowiecki remarked recently. What he didn’t add is that each is very large in
its distillation of the essential, possessing a power of perception that jolts. Each is a
surreal cartoon—like something out of the Beatles, or a Dali painting: one of those
weird disruptions of time and space. Consider “The Men in Marge’s Life”:
One liked her kamikazes and mojitos
and surprised her with nighties and mules.
One, an electrician, wound her life around his
as he would wire around his arm. One
had one nipple. One thumbed the moon
out of the sky as if it were a lozenge in a silver
wrapper and placed it at her feet. One provided
examples but never explanations as to why love
becomes unborn in a misappropriation of time.
One let her basil go to seed and her peonies
go flowerless; and in a snapshot she took,
one is his own ghost, double-exposed and half
cigarette smoke, floating above the first
unshoveled morning of out last hard winter.
How can one help but be taken, in every sense, by such charged imagery and metaphor?
By such concise and powerful language? By the unalloyed perception that is both
revealed to and forced on us? Indeed, this and all forty-three of the poems in this
amazing book provide “examples but never explanations.” One might as well try to
explain in simple terms the paradoxes of the quantum realm.
We read Suroweicki’s poems and are necessarily bewitched—by their twining of the minutiae of the “normal” everyday or mundane world (our perceptions, that is) and the really bizarre and surreal shifts into another dimension altogether. The metaphors the poet arrives at contribute to that mind-altering sense of the otherworldly bizarre: “
artists with eyes like the bubble/ of a carpenter’s level” (simile); “that its fish wore
fedoras” (shades of Yellow Submarine or Dali); “Even a cardinal, a quart of blood in a tree.” Plus, there is the sheer off-kilter descriptive power displayed again and again,
as in “Operetta”:
They’ve saved their stricken mother,
blinding Death with their beauty and charm
a
nd locking him in a pantry filled
with canned goods—which is why
in mid-January, their myrtle blooms
in driveway shadows and the blue
earths of hydrangeas reappear with
small orange butterflies falling from
the heavens to seek them out. Now
their winter nights are our June nights,
thick with the aftershaves of young men . . . .
Perhaps the most revelatory aspect of Surowiecki’s poetry is the humor coursing throughout the poems. It is a clever and often sly humor that feeds into the surreal and
bizarre elements, but what really distinguishes it is the way it often grounds itself in an
equally compelling compassion. A very fine example of this is “The Angel of Death Returns to
New Haven”:
The angel of death who placed the weight
of the world upon your helpless heart now asks
for our forgiveness, thinking he might have made
a terrible mistake taking you as early as he did,
not realizing what a good and principled man
you were and how the world would become
duller and cheaper and more brittle without you.
He drops by when we’re clearing out a spot
for your tomatoes, a balding man in
Bermuda
shorts who asks if he can bring us coffee
and crullers or maybe pick up a few things
at Home Depot; and when he has nothing more to say,
he blinks and blinks and blinks and blinks,
holding back the tears the world has yet to see.
While losing none of the surrealism that defines his poetry, Surowiecki employs a devastating humor that in its power is redemptive and thus grounded in compassion. That, too, is the power of the language itself: so sharp, so specific, and so playful. How many poets would conceive of death dramatically as an angel in Bermuda
shorts
who, realizing his mistake in taking so soon such a “good and principled man,” tries
to achieve redemption through good deeds? Not many. We laugh viscerally at such
a portrait, but we realize, by the end, the limits of death’s remorse: he still holds back “
the tears the world has yet to see.” There is both a brutal honesty and a deeply felt
compassion. There is, in short, that which defines us, or should, as human beings.
So this is the poetry of John Surowiecki. In poem after poem he explores,
with a variety of specific subject matter and poetic forms and varied and vividly
expressive language, that “misappropriation of time” alluded to earlier, and in
doing so deconstructs our “normal” perceptions so that we might re-appropriate
our own humanity as it evolves in time and space. In the poem, “My Backyard Celebrates the Pope’s Birthday,” Surowiecki says that “The lilacs speak
eleven languages.” So does he, and as we finish this wonderful book we smile,
nod in recognition, and say:
Keep the tabs coming, Mr. Surowiecki, keep the tabs coming!