Bill Brown has a wonderful gift for finding poetry in unlikely places—a brother’s hands, an old photograph, a church sign—and from these tatters of memory and attentiveness he has assembled a book filled with wisdom and memorable poems. —Ron Rash
A lot of contemporary poets suffer from myopia—they can only focus close-up. Private sorrows and personal history tend to supersede any attempt at breadth of vision or social awareness. Ours is an era of poetic miniaturists, fascinated with the drama of isolated souls. That#146;s not altogether bad, since sweeping statements have a tendency to swell into bombast. But miniatures have a limit to their charm, too. Navel gazing, even at its most skillful, can get awfully tiresome. So it’s a pleasure to come across a poet who successfully makes the small experiences of the individual speak to truths of the wider world, as Nashville poet Bill Brown does in his new collection, Tatters.
For example, in "My Brother’s Hands, 1964," Brown carries us from an odd, awkward moment at a family picnic—when his elder brother, a doctor, pets a harmless rat snake who wanders into the party—to the horrors of Vietnam. The linking event is the tragic, needless death of the snake at the hands of children coarsened by religious superstition: “[B]ut the boys from the Baptist picnic found it first, / and steeped in their parents’ lore, / stoned it into oblivion.” The final stanza brings snake, boyws, God, and war together in an exquisite, unforced image: “At night I dreamed the physicians hands / holding a serpentine staff instead / of a crucifix, bless the foreheads / of boys he couldn’t save.” The poem is a nearly perfect portayal of the way our private memories resonate against reality. It maps the psychic space in which the individual meets ideas and events beyond his immediate experience.
That's the space where politics are born, and there is a political element—though never a polemical one—in these poems. Brown insists, above all, on the necessity of connecton, as in the witty “Children Who Love Holes,” a paean to pierced and tattooed youth who make their bodies a mirror of their tortured planet: “the children who love holes/ shave their heads like strip mines, / like devastated rain forests, / or they shape their hair into spikes that / poke the sky like urban landscapes.” Here, as in all 31 of the poems in Tatters, Brown pushes the reader deftly but firmly, to see what joins the contents of the human heart to the state of its world.
This ability to shift focus from the ephemeral detail to the big picture is complemented by Brown’s gift for finding humor, and even sweetness in grim realities. He’s never saccharine, and he doesn’t soften the bad news with jokes. Instead, he walks an ironic tightrope, creating a pleasurable tension for the reader as he teeters alternately toward the dark and the light, as in “Pigeon,” a wry look at the homeless.
The undersides of bridges speak pigeon
That’s why the homeless camp there,
to learn the language. It’s a holistic
program. They eat and sleep together
and rarely talk to outsiders, except
to bum a quarter, a dollar if they’re
lucky. It’s hard to get study grants
or government loans, pigeons not being
in much demand, pigeons, themselves,
uncertified…
That concrete-to-conceptual leap—from the visual image of the bridge’s inhabitants to the existential parallels between them—happens again and again in Tatters. In the collection’s title poem, Brown writes, “Much has been said about the toll / images take upon the mind and body…” He might well be referring to his own work, which is concerned above all with the way perceptions of the world trigger an interior response, and how that response in turn causes us to act within the world. The poems in this collection are deceptively simple—mostly free verse, composed of simple language and thoroughly ordinary images. Their genius lies in the way Brown uses such homely tools to excavate a delicate, usually hidden place in the psyche where observation meets emotion, where feeling meets action.