Driving After Midnight
One hand on the wheel,
the other spinning
through stations,
trying to find a voice,
a familiar song—anything
to keep me from thinking
about everything that’s happened,
that could happen.
This next hotel is further
from my family than the last.
Darkness comes early
now, and for hours
I’ve been driving into it.
I imagine my wife
turning in her sleep,
and I’m missing
the way her leg
sometimes wakes me
momentarily with its warmth.
Tonight taillights
and the blinding high beams
are what I know of other people,
until an ambulance passes,
no sirens or flashing lights,
just the back of the rig
glowing, fluorescent,
illuminating a heavy man
propped up on a gurney,
tubes running from his nostrils
over his ears and down
into something I can’t see.
Through a rear window
his pale face looks
as though it’s on TV.
I’ve seen too much lately
and start to turn away,
when a paramedic rises
from crouching, says something,
and twice strokes
the man’s thinning hair,
rousing me before the vision disappears
down an off-ramp,
leaving me deaf to the static,
both hands on the wheel.
1-882983-91-2
33 pages/$9
In these carved and crafted out of hardscrabble poems,
Jeff Vande Zande makes seamless the natural world and the
worlds constructed by the human. He is our Virgil leading us
through the daily grinding down of our hearts, through the
realization that the violence and splendor of the outside
world has its inner equivalent. Early on in this gently savage
collection, Vande Zande’s narrator goes down into the
basement of his family home and discovers the overlooked,
forsaken, and in all the corners, those things one wants to
forget but refuses or can’t discard. It is a fitting metaphor. In
these basements we find our history and the mold growing
on it. About half way through the collection, the narrator’s
voice, so full of a terrible beauty when talking of his father,
suddenly turns tender, almost muted. It’s then that we
discover that he is now a father. The book becomes a
testimony that this father has broken the circle in the
basement of hell, has “come out/wanting to be ready in case
the pilot light goes out.”
—Jack Ridl
The poems in Jeff Vande Zande’s Tornado Warning display
an intense scrutiny and attention to the small shifts
in the wind that signal love, or disaster. Their tough, tight
music sings with both hope and despair, both acceptance
and doubt. The subtle grace of these poems illuminates the
darkness beneath the surface of these lives, and all our lives.
—Jim Daniels
JEFF VANDE ZANDE: TORNADO WARNING
MARCH STREET PRESS
3413 Wilshire Dr, Greensboro NC 27408, USA
http://http://marchstreetpress.com
ISBN: 1-882983-91-2
Reviewed by IAN SEED
In sensitive, unsentimental language Jeff Vande Zande examines relationships
in his family. The present and past are seamlessly juxtaposed, and he shows
how in many ways the past never leaves us. There is delight in tender moments,
in the past with his father, or in the present with his small son, but there
is terror at what lies just beneath the surface, at what can go horribly wrong
at any time. Vande Zande speaks with a highly personal voice, but it is one we
can identify and emphasise with. Reading his poetry we are made more aware of
the intricacies of our own attitudes towards our families and our everyday
lives at home.
Jeff Vande Zande, now a father with a young son, remembers his own father and
his father’s father, as he deals with living in the here and now. Some of the
memories revolve around tragedy or near tragedy, for example, his father’s
attempted suicide:
“He remembers his father, his race home
every Friday night to remind himself
why he worked outdoors all week,
awake and asleep in the cold woods.
How could his mother have known what he’d do
the weekend she took the boys to Duluth?” (from IN THE BASEMENT)
There is irony here, too, for Vande Zande is walking on a treadmill, a little
like Sisyphus, in his basement to keep fit (this is his race and presumably
he doesn’t have to work outdoors in the way his father did). The exercise
gives him “time to think” and “he usually forgives his father”, yet the memory
haunts him and the possibility of destruction of life is always near.
In the title poem TORNADO WARNING, the poet drives listening to “the steady
voice” on the radio announcing “that the chances end at 7.45”. A boy shoots
out from a side street, and Vande Zande recognises his own son “not
looking / both ways - reckless”. He realises “we can’t predict any of this”
and huddles his family in the basement until he decides for himself “when the
danger has passed”.
This theme is continued in the stark and powerful poem DRIVING HOME FROM A
NIECE’S FUNERAL when his car ends up on the side of the road after a deer
crosses their path:
“I check my son’s sleeping face
shimmering in the rearview mirror
he fusses against the car’s stillness
Probably safe now, my wife whispers
But what I’m sure of anymore is meagre
like my highbeams in this blackness
my sister had only laid her infant
daughter to bed on her belly…”
Vande Zande’s relationship with his past is highly ambivalent (which is surely
the case for most of us). Sometimes the past gets in the way of living in the
present: “Wanting to see his backyard” through the holes he makes in a steamed
over window as he takes a shower he only “sees deeper into his own eyes”
(WINTER MORNING). At the same time, some part of him wishes to return to that
past:
“He stands the way he stood years ago
in autumn, waiting for his father’s
yellowed fingers to corkscrew
a wool sweater down over his head.”
Or he remembers his father tucking him in “on beaches….And this too goes back
through ghosts / of other fathers…” (BACK CASTING, FORWARD CASTING).
The poems are full of such moments of tenderness. For example, there is a
beautiful description of the poet with his toddler son in swimming classes:
“… my fingers
snug between the ripple
of his ribs, my hand nearly
covering his chest.
Above my other palm, though,
I feel the pump and pedal
Of his comical little legs.” (TODDLER CLASSES).
Yet the past continues to haunt. Contrast the poem I have just quoted with
the following lines from REPRIEVE:
“We chose to have a child
in the shadow of more fear
than we’ve ever known…
…dark memories, tower
from the water, threatening to fall
and crash through the surface
of the perception of everything
we’re feeling today.”
Bleak words describing a harsh world. Yet the overall feeling one derives from
Jeff Vande Zande’s poems is one of affirmation. It is precisely because so
many dark things can and do happen, that we need to make the most of the life
and love we have.
“Standing against the strong current,
the men pause
to watch fingerling trout,
small rainbows breaking the surface,
foolish with hunger and life.” (SUNDOWN)
If, in spite of our terrors, we dare to open ourselves to beauty and allow
ourselves to love, our lives will be worth the living. Reading Jeff Vande
Zande’s poetry is a powerful and liberating experience.
Reviewed by IAN SEED