(If This Is the) New World
Mark DeCarteret
(If This Is the) New World
Then I must be the little boy
awoken by the panda’s breath.
Must be the dazed chick, the eggplant.
The wood as it swallowed the first of the nails.
I must be the meteor. The radish having fits.
A blossom being snapped into place.
All the worshipper’s gazing.
If this is the New World I must be the sheet
they’ve tacked up between night time and day.
The over cooked spinach and the stone
it’s been harboring. What the skeleton says.
I must be the two by four resisting the shoulder.
The eye sty. The wash tub.
The straw-hatted woman lugging
crates of snow down the mountain.
I must be the exception, the one accused
of leaving the inflatable raft in the pool.
The one hoisting coveralls. Blessed with plenty of meat.
If this is the New World then I must be the answer
to why or the boat on a child’s first block.
The eligible proverb. Almost any confusion.
The print of the unicorn over the couch.
I must be the imprint of teeth.
The last leaf detaching itself from the present.
Some dust listening under your door.
Must be the plate of the soul or a peasant’s tattered ear.
The agency head, yes I must.
If this is the New World I must be a flyer
conversing with the bottom of a shoe.
A space suit. This upholstery.
The line about crows long-forgotten.
The joy in the pit of the piñata.
I must be the pumpkin seed’s nightmare.
A limp and a clearing of throat.
The clicking of time under glass.
I must be the ice’s refrain. All additional damage.
The slit in the groin of the bear.
And the wings they’ve picked clean.
If this is the New World I must be the red
blinking light thinking always of home.
isbn 1-59661-059-X
52 pages/$9
Cover painting by Robert Hamilton,
used with permission from Nancy Hamilton.
To enter these poems is to enter a world we’ve too easily forbidden ourselves access to. Through them we remember what it is we’ve almost given up on: a language capable of re-designing the body’s intricate architecture to meet the needs of the ongoing event of our lives.
—James Rioux,
author of Fistfuls of the Invisible
No new poet writes with such grace & quirkiness, awe & irreverence. Read these poems. You’ll wander in a land of bees & meringue. You’ll fear old age; you’ll be “maneuvered by chance” and when you are done, your racing heart will be knocking to get back in.
—Mimi White,
Portsmouth Poet Laureate, 2005–2007
The poems of Mark DeCarteret are vibrant with language that not only surprises, even startles, but also offers the reader a particular lexicon of meditation and attentiveness. This collection might be considered a poetry of survival in the new millennium, except it demands much more of us than that.
—W.E. Butts,
author of Sunday Evening at the Stardust Café
Mark DeCarteret embraces the cosmic presence in both the large and minute manifestations of nature, and links human desires and aspirations to these timeless imperatives. His poems embody this paradigm with grace, wisdom, and a healthy grasp of syntax.
—William Doreski,
author of Another Ice Age
To view other paintings by the late Robert Hamilton, click here.
From the Hippo, May 3-9, 2007:
Stratham, NH’s Mark DeCarteret’s first chapbook (available from the New Hampshire Institute of Art at the Camera Shop on Amherst Street in Manchester) is surprising. Structurally the 30 poems included in this collection are simple and direct. But it’s far from simple poetry. The complexity of themes and metaphors, primarily dealing with the relationship between man and nature, could suffocate the individual poems if not for DeCarteret’s tendency to sprinkle his prose with a phrase or image that will sneak up on you in the middle of a poem, catching you off guard with its direct power. In “Pink Eye,” the narrator considers items washed up on a beach and relates what he sees to the passage of time, the problems of everyday life and old age. Not particularly heady themes, but the poem is rife with lines like “My muttonchops are busy with fleas,” and “I cough up some fluid, reminisce.”
DeCarteret’s poetry relies on the strength of individual pieces to bring together the whole. It’s an impressive feat.
In the collection’s best poem, “Baldness,” the opening line is “the toupee he found at a prizefight on the counter of a souvenir stand smelled of pickled eggs and Cristmas cologne.” How could anyone resist reading on?
— Dan Szczestly
Seacoast Poet Explores the New World
Patrick Law
Early in his writing career, Mark DeCarteret would sit with pen in hand, waiting for moments of inspiration that he thought would yield mountains of publishable poetry. He’s since learned that inspiration doesn’t come in a flash. It’s derived from the steady stream of human experience, which can be channeled into poetry only if the author is emotionally and mentally receptive to the ebb and flow of life. Think of radio waves, which constantly pulse through the air but produce a discernable message only when listeners adjust their antennae. If an author is tuned into the continuous flow of insights and observations that all humans experience, they can channel their words to create something beautiful.
DeCarteret’s fourth collection of poetry (If This Is the) New World, was published this year by March Street Press…. DeCarteret’s poetry blends emotive and powerful imagery. Nature, religion, politics, family, aging, and death are just a few of the topics that he dissects with his lines. “And you tore at the soil / with something like defiance, / the bluntest form of prayer,” he writes in a poem called “The Skeleton.”
During a recent visit to Breaking New Grounds in Portsmouth, DeCarteret wore a collared blue shirt and round, tinted eyeglasses, the same shade as his sandy-colored hair. DeCarteret is now a seasoned poet, having move beyond the idealism of youth, which he considers a distraction to writing good poetry. One fellow poet advises writers to wait until they turn 35, seclude themselves somewhere without distractions and then start writing poetry, DeCarteret recalled.
Originally from Lowell, Massachusetts—hometown of beat poet Jack Kerouac—DeCarteret now lives in Stratham. Several teachers encouraged him to pursue writing at a young age, although the same teachers were very candid about what it means to be a poet and the challenges the pursuit entails. “Poetry always seems like one of those things that people are drawn to, but they don’t necessarily know why,” DeCarteret said. “Their idea of poetry is often very different from what is actually involved in being a poet. My first teachers kind of laid out the path and I realized this was going to be a more serious undertaking than I first thought, but I felt like it was the only thing I could ever really do.”
He received his BFA in creative writing from Emerson College and his MA in English from the University of New Hampshire. In addition to writing poetry, he has taught at Chester College, the Maine College of Art, and the New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester.
The title of his new book is derived from a poem of the same name. It was inspired by a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet that included a visual representation of what some consider heaven to look like. An image of a young boy with a panda bear sitting on his lap struck DeCarteret as an odd depiction of heaven. As pleasant as a panda on the lap would be, this couldn’t be the universal notion of what heaven is, he thought.
DeCarteret believes people understand heaven and hell based on their own individual notions of pleasure and pain. Many of the poems in his book explore the sordid underbelly of this world, but they also touch on the sublime possibilities of human experience. By exploring both themes, DeCarteret expresses his conviction that there can be no pleasure without pain, nor heaven without hell. The world’s duality is what makes it interesting and ideal.
“This world is as otherworldly as it gets,” he said. “I don’t think you have to go into the deeper recesses of the subconscious to find good subject matter.”
His poems are not simple documentations of his daily experience, though. “I certainly pull from my surroundings to some degree,” DeCarteret said, but living on the Seacoast has not inspired his poetry in any direct way. Although many of his poems are based on a “germ or kernel” of something seen or overheard, it usually gets left behind as the poem progresses.
“The sea is impressive, obviously. Nature is always a good standby,” he said. “Poets have made careers going back to nature again and again. That’s one of my problems. I don’t stay focused. I think you’ll find a lot of poets either discover their voice or resort to one voice and that’s something I’ve never been able to settle on.”
Just as themes of darkness and light vary in DeCarteret’s poems, so too does his voice. At times very accessible and at times slightly opaque, his poetry reflects the full spectrum of human experience. He is hopeful (If This Is the) New World will be well received, despite the fact that “poetry is always going to have a small audience.”