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Care For An Accident?
Reviewed by Elizabeth Myhr
Blue Mouth, Chapbook, J.W. Marshall, 2001, Wood Works, Seattle, Washington, $9.00 paper.
Wood Works has done it again. Great woodcuts, superb typesetting, clean design and a wonderful book of poems. Why Poetry did not review this chapbook is beyond me. Their editors, who received Blue Mouth in the mail, missed a great opportunity.
If you are intellectual at all, you will enjoy Blue Mouth immediately. That being said, the poems are about a man who goes to the hospital for an extended stay after a horrendous car accident. The poems’ narrator is so physically hurt that “I burned away/but stuck around” and so deeply unfazed that “An ambulance siren/is beside the point/like a fork beside a piece of cake.” Original and graciously low on pathos, Marshall writes with the skillful touch of a great absurdist.
His gift in this book is an ability to pair experiences with objects to give us a look into the absurdity of suffering. I hope his deadly humor will surprise you as much as it did me. Funny on the first reading, the second reading makes you realize how much pain and despair lurk between these lines, in a way that doesn’t show off or sulk.
My good roommate breathes
alive along with me
like a water clock in his sleep.
He latches onto bits of air
and lets them go. I
listen to the persistence.
Needles in our arms
add us to the fabric.
Ghosts gather in the hall
their clay gone dry
then file past our open door
each turning and nodding
and murmuring a so what as a kindness.
Out the window
brown dark and stars whisper
and the wad of violets on the windowsill
whispers so what and sleep and
someone plans to call you early.
Oh that fabulous wad of violets! If Marshall’s poems initially masquerade as lackadaisical absurdities, the isolation evoked in these poems is remarkable. The last two poems of the book return you to the awful, wrenching existence of life after a life-threatening car accident. Tender and despairing, they’re beautiful, too. But no happy ending. Just anger and consequences—a quick mind finally surfacing from its own shock to the inevitable grief of a serious, painful reality.
If you like to read chapbooks of poetry published in Seattle in 2001, don’t miss this one.