NEIL
LEADBEATER Reviews
Prelude to Bruise by Saeed
Jones
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2014)
This collection opens with a quotation by Franz Kafka:
The man in ecstacy and the man drowning –
both throw up their arms. The British poet Stevie Smith made a whole poem
out of a not too dissimilar observation when she wrote “Not Waving but Drowning.“ Its last two lines – I was
much too far out all my life / And not waving but drowning – underscored
a sub-text that was to become one of her most celebrated poems of all time. The
quotation from Kafka gives the reader a hint of what is to come because these
are poems that dance on the edge of danger.
Saeed Jones is a 2013 Pushcart prize winner and the
author of a chapbook When the Only Light
is Fire (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2011). He was born in Memphis, Tennessee
and raised in Louisville, Texas. He received his MFA in Creative Writing at
Rutgers University-Newark and is a recipient of several fellowships from Cave
Canem and Queer / Art / Mentorship. He works as the editor of Buzzfeed LGBT and lives in New York. Prelude to Bruise is his first
full-length collection.
Structurally, the poems are divided into several
sections of varying length: a prologue, four substantial segments, an extended
poem and a postscript. At its core, the dominant theme that weaves its way
through the text is that of Boy –a boy named Boy- who is a Black
African-American child struggling to cope with his homosexuality in an
unforgiving landscape. Desire, and how we choose to channel it, or struggle to
control it, is at the heart of many of these poems.
One of the earliest poems in the collection, Closet of Red, is about a child who
enters a kind of fantasy world when he steps inside his mother’s wardrobe and sees her clothes.
The opening lines are shot through with an unexpected beauty:
In place of no, my leaking mouth spills foxgloves.
Trumpets of tongued blossoms litter the locked closet.
Up to my ankles in petals, the hanged gowns close in,
mother multiplied, more –there’s always more
corseted ghosts, red-silk bodies crowd
my mouth.
For me, the surprise element in this collection is the
imagery that Jones chooses to employ to describe sexual feelings or encounters.
These images are developed further later on in the collection. Some of them are
reminiscent of the sexual attraction of plants to bees who enter the bells of
foxgloves to cover themselves in a dust storm of pollen. Against a backdrop of male
brutality and lust he conjures up images from the natural world that are feminine,
tender and beautiful and it is this that makes these poems so powerful and
engaging.
A child hiding in its mother’s
wardrobe or trying on clothes is all a part of growing up. In The Blue Dress Jones offers us an
extended reflection on a mother’s dress. Desire for the dress is portrayed
through the image of water. The desire becomes overwhelming and unstoppable as
the boy is carried away by the current of his desire. The physicality of the
body is very present in this and other poems. The human body is made up of between
50% to 65% of water and a lot of water flows through this poem. It also flows
through a number of other poems in the book. There is a sense of inevitable
progression here. What starts off as a puddle becomes a flood and then a river
and then a sea. What starts off as a small boat becomes a ship. Jones propels
the reader along with his imagery.
The sexual attraction of clothing
and the excitement of cross-dressing comes to the fore in “Boy In A Stolen
Evening Gown“:
In this field of thistle, I am the improbable
lady. How I wear the word: sequined weight
snagging my saunter into overgrown grass, blonde
split-end blades...
The dress is only put on so that it
can be taken off:
....Ask me
and I’ll slip out of this softness, the dress
a black cloud at my feet. I could be the boy
wearing nothing, a negligee of gnats.
“Boy In A Whalebone Corset“ gives us an insight into the painful
restraint that a boy feels when he is unable to be himself because of the
presence of a threatening, homophobic father:
.....Father in my room
looking for more sissy clothes
to burn. Something pink in his fist,
negligee, lace, fishnet, whore.
The early sexual encounters are edgy
and furtive and suffused with guilt. In “Boy At Edge Of Woods“ we witness the aftermath of such an
encounter. This is no afterglow. Boy walks back to his burning house. This house is no place of welcome. He already feels
the full force of his father’s wrath upon him.
It is from such encounters that he
seeks protection. This takes various forms. It might be by hiding inside his
mother’s wardrobe, it might be by lacing himself up in a woman’s corset or by
dreaming that he is living inside a wolf.
Boy cannot help himself. He knows he
is in a minority. He knows he will be misunderstood. Above all, he needs to
express himself. In “Boy At Threshold“ he says:
I’ve always wanted to be dangerous.
Several of the poems in this volume deal with racism and racist acts of
violence. At the very beginning of the book, in the Prologue, Jones already
hints at what is to come later on:
......Beware
of how they want you;
in this town everything
born black
also burns.
The title poem comes in the third section. It is a harsh and powerful
exposé of racism in America today. Jones writes it in such a way that the poem
itself becomes an act of violence not least through the frequent alliteration
of the letter b and the constant
repetition of the word Boy as some
kind of racial insult:
In Birmingham, said the
burly man ...
Boy, be
a bootblack
Your back, blue-back,
Your body, burning
I
like my black boys broke, or broken.
I
like to break my black boys in.
The same kind of verbal punching is replicated in the staccato rhythms
that are to be found in "Thralldom II."
In “Jasper 1998,“ a poem told
through the voice of James Byrd Jr, a Texan who was murdered by three white
supremacists, Jones describes the last moments when Byrd was hauled along the
road, his ankles chained to a pick-up truck, to meet his death.
The extended prose poem “History,
According to Boy“ looks back in many ways to the first part of the book. Taken
together, they are some of the finest poems in the collection. They are also
the most accessible. In them we find an honest account of a boy growing up in
an atmosphere of homophobic aggression and racial tension. The poems about Boy are the most direct. His
voice is central to the whole collection. His distress is all-too apparent and
heart-breaking. As he says in “Postapocalyptic Heartbeat“:
Half this life I’ve spent falling out of fourth-storey
windows.
Pigeons for hair, wind for feet. Sometimes I sing
Stormy Weather on the way down. Today, Strange Fruit.
The recurring imagery that Jones
employs throughout the book helps to give the reader a more complete picture.
This has the effect of drawing the poems into a cohesive whole. One of these
images is the gun. It is not too difficult to make the connection between an
erect phallus and a loaded gun. The image is present in “Apologia“ and it is at its most explicit in the
prose poem “History; According To Boy.“ Another,
more frequent, image is that of the mouth. This works on several levels. On one
level it is a receptacle of sexual pleasure, of deep-throated desire; on the
other it acts as a metaphor for hunger, for sexual craving; and on yet another
it is the body part through which we articulate our thoughts in speech.
This is a powerful debut from a poet
who knows what he is about. It is bold and it is timely. There are some
astonishing moments of beauty within it but a little judicious pruning might
have guarded against some of the subject matter becoming too repetitive after a
while.
*****
Neil Leadbeater is an
author, essayist, poet and critic living in Edinburgh, Scotland. His short
stories, articles and poems have been published widely in anthologies and
journals both at home and abroad. His most recent books are Librettos for the Black Madonna (White
Adder Press, Scotland, 2011); The
Worcester Fragments (Original Plus Press, England, 2013); The Loveliest Vein of Our Lives (Poetry
Space, England, 2014), The Fragility of Moths (Bibliotheca
Universalis, Romania, 2014) and Sleeve
Notes (Bibliotheca Universalis, Romania, 2016).
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