KEVIN SWANWICK Reviews
Brash Ice by Djelloul Marbrook
(Leaky Book Press, 2014)
An Odyssey for Truth: Reading Djelloul Marbrook’s Brash
Ice
Part of Homer’s cleverness may have been an ability
to imbue his characters with key aspects of their adult personalities while
retaining their childhood through time and travel in the form of stark
memories. This allows us to see certain heroic figures from different
perspectives. These can range from innocence to treachery. Was Odysseus’s
return to Ithaca the reunion of a self-same man and boy; a boy who knew the
simple virtues and innocence of pastoral life, and a man who remembered it,
while carrying the graphic memory of horrific experiences?
In his latest poetry collection, Brash Ice,
Djelloul Marbrook takes us on a modern Homeric journey through boreal climes as
the weathered and wise protagonist carries the weight of sorrows and silence of
a young boy, aboard his ship. This is a long and forthright conversation which
finds a way for the young boy to confront his rapist while the wise old man
navigates perilous and icy waters, struggling to bring them home together, at
peace. At times, it is not clear whether they will make it or not. In the
opening chapter titled Proem, the poet is frank about the dire
responsibility carried by persons of conscience and the risks we all face when
being direct and honest with ourselves and others.
With startling clarity a herald starts us on our
journey with a stark warning about the seriousness of the matter at hand. From handling
plutonium:
so this business of being you
is about handling plutonium
and is much more dangerous
than your parents said….
The poet has inverted the struggle of the
dispossessed boy and the heroically surviving man. The elder is coming back to
rescue the boy, before the world, in the hope that together they can navigate
their arctic ship to its final destination. It is as if the boy has been hidden
away in the cargo hold and the elder must tell their story because he has the
voice, while the imprisoned boy retains the unspeakable memory. The journey is
approaching its end and the protagonist informs us that this is not his first
attempt at deliverance. Telling the story honestly and plainly has proven to be
a great burden. Perhaps artistic devices had been used to divert our eyes while
telling only half of a story? Now the artist, finding himself in a frozen
landscape, means to get down to business. We are given a clear statement of
intention and a foreshadowing of the storytelling devices, which have been
sharpened by years of practice in both artistic creation and evasion: a
confessional in stunning imagery.
if i had a painterly eye
here’s what i would do to celebrate,
i’d show me atoms of something else
in the manner of seurat or tanguy,
a congress of memories,
a sufferance like frankenstein’s beast
becoming more than its parts
hankering to fulfill their longings,
i’d witness the sidelong world,
i’d lay my own ashes,
i’d make athena blink.
i’d study brash ice.
failing that i’d call failure life
& unmask myself as a firefly
nobody caught in a jar.
Each of these assertions are really conditional and
dependent on the “if” and each is explored, in turn, in later chapters. At
the end of this preface we have the poem escapade where the poet reminds
the reader that we can easily fool ourselves but that our self-correction is
both possible and self-evident if we are honest. But our corrections will
not bury our errors, no matter what we do.
i take the task seriously,
i’m able to correct my work
and i know its pentimento
will be explored. snapshots
never interested me, nor beauty
agreed upon by voyeurs…
And attempts at beating around the bush, to circle
the problem, to avoid facing an horrific truth, are all too human and seen in
the light of pathology and error.
…a peripheral glance that jars
our nerve ends loose,
diseases that best define
our escapades at being well.
There is a startling freshness here as our hero’s
voice is heard wrestling with the demon who might have killed the boy, but
instead wounded him in the most intimate and harmful way and left him for
spiritually dead. There are the bystanders too, those who could not or would
not reach the stranded boy on his unwanted, forbidden ground. There is
something awful afoot. When the boy faces manhood, the only choice is for the
man to come into being and leave the boy, locking him away in the hold, while
trying to navigate the world with whatever skills he has kept.
Sexual abuse of children is now spoken about in the
open. Its uncovering has been scandalous as the indescribable pain of victims
and the sociopathic indifference and survival instincts of predators are
suddenly uncovered like sheets ripped from one in repose on a cold night. Few
have been able to describe the journey of the victim. In Brash Ice we
find the protagonist in possession of long life experience, wisdom and the
unique perspective of an abused child presented through the lens of an adult
master’s “painterly eye.” But that eye is now directed with more than a
glance, as if to say “no more bullshit.” Our pathologies can be foist
upon us and somehow we must carry on.
These poems identify the universal in our human
struggle while staying remarkably personal, intensely tragic but also
triumphant.
The author seems to carry on a subtle conversation
with the protagonist, making himself known in this long and beautiful
confessional as the artist who has come to terms with his past and wishes to be
done with falsity so that he can get on with life on life’s terms. We are taken
beyond the local story of a boyhood trauma and into nature and the heart of
things as we might see them if we are present and in full possession of our
attentive senses. In the later chapters there are also strong impressions of
nature and our connection to it through sensation and esthetics.
Throughout this collection, the poet eschews the
limits of punctuation, embracing minimalism and relying utterly on superb
prosody and meter to keep the reader in the wake of his vessel. The
first-person subject pronoun is cast into the picture frame in lower case with
all of the related parts of the poem so that the artist can honestly assess the
complete landscape. In the chapter i’d witness the sidelong world, we
encounter the poem frisking the periphery, where the artist sets down
his paint brush and picks up his camera, reflecting on how we can see
everything around a thing before we see the thing itself. A useful talent and
perhaps a form of unconscious evasion. Marbrook’s years of photography
experience are evident.
being a ninety-degree camera,
all i miss is straight ahead.
i adjust for light and flash,
i zoom to sync my paranoia.
you look as if you’re being shot,
but i’m frisking the periphery.
everything behind my subject
is in focus, but the foreground
breeds misunderstanding…
…i am the green wink of chagrin
simply because i have no trash bin.
Later musings include lamentations of the artist
condemned to create, unable to simply observe. But as Wallace Stevens seemed to
wonder about the survival of his poems in the Planet on the Table, our
author wonders how his words can both represent and be a part of his final
spiritual journey if the whole truth is not there.
i don’t want to become like this again
after so much heartfelt unbecoming,
all this tedium and plot. i haven’t even got
a scent to contribute to the flowering
whose warmth i feel through the tunnel ahead.
i should have lost my soul in books.
i tried but it proved a handy figment:
what’s death but what i have to work with now?
We see that this imperative defines the journey.
The early reference to the title poem, which we don’t
encounter until near the end of the journey, foreshadows much of the winter and
arctic imagery ahead. Both Frankenstein and brash ice share the outward feature
of fragmentation, parts formed together; one in an unnatural way and the other
the result of natural thermal activity. The scars remain and it is the truth of
their formation that this journey seeks to reveal so that a complete story may
be told. In its frankness, this collection offers the reader the kinds of
startling moments found in Homer or Beowulf. It also opens us to the
beating heart of its creator, who from experience eerily places us in the
arctic seas of the Cold War, the natural landscape of the Hudson Valley and the
quirkiness of places like Woodstock, NY.
Brash Ice reckons with the past and leaves us with ample
evidence that this poet is as fresh and vital as ever, having sought reunion
with an injured but aspiring youth while offering the wisdom that only a long
and examined life can bring.
i’ve said too much and said it flatly
because i thought the song pretentious
that splinters the wardrobe of the years
and shovels me out the door a naked stranger.
Surely, there will be more to come.
*****
Kevin Swanwick resides in
the Hudson Valley of New York with his wife, two children, mother in-law and
three dogs. He finds the world a terribly complex place and likes to write
about it from the perspective of a grateful citizen of Carthage who got to
watch the Romans invade but was spared because of his accidental usefulness.
His essays and some fiction
can be found in Elephant Journal, LA Progressive and on his blog, in no
particular order. http://swanwickmuse.blogspot.com/
Another view is offered by Eileen Tabios in GR #24 at
ReplyDeletehttp://galatearesurrection24.blogspot.com/2015/05/brash-ice-by-djelloul-marbrook.html