Rob Jacques reviews A.E. Hines's ANY DUMB ANIMAL

ANY DUMB ANIMAL   

A review by Rob Jacques

A. E. Hines’s debut poetry collection, Any Dumb Animal, is an often poignant and always touching take on learning life’s lessons as a gay person. These lessons are difficult enough to learn for straight people, but throw a cruel, insensitive, macho father into the mix—along with a deeply prejudiced society and an unfaithful partner—and you have a situation that can only be described as volatile and potentially suicidal, a frightening environment in which one must learn how to find love.

The title of the book is taken from a father’s angry shout. Wanting to make his boy more “man-like” by forcing him to swim, the man drags the thoroughly hysterical, screaming youngster down a pier toward deep water and tosses him in. As the boy flounders, chokes, and sinks, his father yells, “Any dumb animal can learn!” Yes, we can. We can learn intolerance, fear, hatred, self-pity, and cruelty. In this situation, only the lucky learn to love. Hines is one of the lucky ones.

Any Dumb Animal is about being different and learning to cope with that difference in spite of everything and everyone, about seeking out ways to touch and be touched . . .

With lean, clean, simple lines, Hines’s sixty-one poems take us through a childhood blighted with fear and loathing, through a young adulthood of disappointment and deception to a final discovery that finding love involves allowing oneself to be vulnerable, to be afraid, to accept pain, to put oneself out there to be hurt, and then in the end to take an enormous leap of faith . . . with no safety net. And because Hines eventually touches and is touched by a young man with a different culture, ethnicity, language, and worldview, he succeeds. Eventually he comes to understand how fragile, fleeting, and joyfully ordinary two lives combined in a physical and spiritual union can be.

Hines is a fine craftsman of not only simple declarative sentences, but also of expanding thought to move through a series of poems. For example, after two poems that brood on a loveless winter and a barren house after divorce, he gives us a gem of a poem, “The Starry Night,” a meditation on the suicide of one of America’s greatest poets, Anne Sexton. The poem begins with a rumination on how Van Gogh, another suicide, died with the natural world he so loved all around him but unable to salve mental wounds caused by his being “different.” Of Van Gogh, Hines writes, “He gave, as each of us must, / what he had to give / to madness.” Then Hines wonders if Sexton, also cursed by difference, found her last moments filled with calming beauty:

I’d like to think you saw the night sky,
that outside your window
in a palette of blue and gray
the moon swirled in violent orange,
and the stars, unmoored, pulsed
and rolled back to greet you.

In the end, whatever end that might be, people who are cursed with being different in some way must justify themselves only to themselves, not to anyone else.

Any Dumb Animal is about being different and learning to cope with that difference in spite of everything and everyone, about seeking out ways to touch and be touched . . . which is all any of us really need to keep living, keep creating, keep the faith with our fellow humans. Hines, too, aches for that touching in his life and, most rewardingly for us, in these poems.

Rob Jacques lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington, and is the author of War Poet (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017), and Adagio for Su Tung-p’o (Fernwood Press, 2019). A third collection, Dust and Dragons, will be published in early 2023.

A. E. Hines grew up in rural North Carolina and currently lives in Portland, Oregon.  He has been published widely in poetry anthologies and literary journals.

Any Dumb Animal, Poems
by A.E. Hines

ISBN: 978-1-59948-888-2
Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte, NC, 2021

https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/any-dumb-animal-ae-hines/

2021, paperback, 88 pages, $19.00