Far West, Floyd Skloot’s ninth collection, gathers poems about the fragmented recollections often buried under consciousness, a mix of memory and grief, in a way that is singular in style and concept. The work reminds me of Gregory Orr’s remark that to “simply be human as a body in time is to know a number of significant jeopardies.” Readers familiar with Skloot’s poetry, fiction, and memoirs know how these jeopardies, such as the poet’s long struggle with a neuro-virus, have played havoc with his mind, resulting in some brain damage. One can only marvel at how doggedly he pursues his memory through a psychic process of seemingly random associations filtered through consciousness.
In a representative poem, “Tangled,” we hear him trying to recall something he can’t quite articulate due cognitive impairment:
He’s that actor you don’t remember
From the movie you’ve seen a dozen times
Or more. In the background, maybe “September
Song” but you can’t be sure. Was he in the scene
On an island drenched in reds and greens …
What was it he whispered?
Although – or perhaps because — his poems of remembrance are not easily attained, he has shaped this collection as an elegy to past life, his anchoring in family history, framed by linked poems about interfacing with the natural world, poems devoted to an array of childhood icons as well as prominent figures in the arts such as Jules Verne, Schumann, Thomas Hardy, and Rudyard Kipling. As memory loses its definition, loss haunts us. As Wordsworth wrote in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads, it is the poet who phrases loss more profoundly through the embodiment of a language asserting its mastery over disorder and discontinuity.
Far West returns us to universal values that postmodernism has often assailed as being too personal, too much of the artist’s signature, too much of a search and demand for order where instability prevails. From the pastoral to the familial, the mundane to the transcendent, Far West is filled with intelligence, grace, and vigor. Although he confronts the ravages of a chronic illness that is not only painful but uprooting and disorienting, his eloquence persists. In “Over and Over,” Skloot describes an “out of body” experience in which he observes his own brain compelled to retrieve fragments of the past through the repetitions of old songs:
My brain is a jukebox stuffed with old songs
Playing a phrase or two at random over
And over. I keep the volume turned low
But you can sometimes see my lips move
Far West opens with perhaps one of its most moving poems, which can be read as a poem of acceptance of what is to come in an uncertain future. “The Lost Name” begins decisively:
One day this fall I could not remember
The name of the island in Hawaii
Where we’d spent a week in December.
There was a wall around the word.
Paradoxically, here he remembers what he is forgetting — first the name of the island, as if amnesia surrounds it like a reef, not allowing access to the name yet permitting a recall of the very detailed scenery that provoked the memory in the first place. Here I see some of the sensuous colors and light endemic to its lush, Wallace Stevens-like fauna, in an ocean paradise which becomes mythic: “the yellow tang / ablaze in the reef as sunlight swept / through a quick break of cloud.” More than once this reference to clouds loosening into clarity is suggestive of the archival work Skloot longs to do, leading him back to childhood, which becomes restorative.
Lowell called childhood “a goldmine” of material stored in memory — both through Wordsworthian “spots of time” (which may be compared to Freud’s “blind spots”) and through Proust’s theory of involuntary memory — the process of memorialization. A spot of time is a memory that stands out as something special, though one can’t place why. It’s the very engine of grief over what is or about to be lost in flux. In “The Lost Name,” Skloot can recall the place and even the time, but not the name, not the essential identity that outlasts us as a marker on a grave.
His search for placement takes in “[n]ames everywhere in [his] brain, nerve cells sparkling / with names” as the mind catalogues sense impressions seemingly disconnected from the words that signify them, even to the point where language is ruptured from the thing itself: “Crimson opakapaka came // to mind. Haleakala, Snorkel Bob’s, / But not the island. Not the sound / of it, not even the first letter.” Then trying to distract himself, he looks around thinking it might come to him. The past that becomes the present is always as fleeting as it is eternal. One has the experience but misses the meaning. For the poet so intent on being the custodian of his already lived life, this can only come as a revelation of what is transient: “Cattle egret glimpsed in the blink of the eye.”
In another poem, Skloot follows through these blank screen memories which serve as early fragments of traumatic events relived and momentarily grasped. His last section through time in “Chris Cagle is Dead” is entered in a section headed by the year 2016. It is in this poem that he confronts irreversible hardship:
It’s been twenty-eight years
Since a neuro-virus found my brain
Open to attack. My doctors say
With my history I’m lucky the cognitive
Damage is no worse. Lucky to be alive.
When I first saw the scans I thought
my brain looked like cleat-pocked dirt.
He then dreams of playing football and preparing to catch a kickoff, which is like that lost name, that connection that is missing, and he is “aware of my brain / within my skull within my helmet,” but it is only transient. The poem itself seems to offer the answer to its own riddle — but it is our will that draws conclusions like the meaning of the lost name. This is Skloot’s generosity: he gives the reader a reason to query and identify with his plight.
After the first section lays out the excursions of the poems, often drawing on sources in popular culture and the arts, the second section opens the field to an ambition to conjure literary artists who have influenced him, each placed in his own milieu. I found the next section to be most captivating because of its tactile immediacy, the way Skloot resurrects his early life and the parents and grandparents who raised him, including the mother who ultimately reverts to her own dependency on her son
Skloot’s taut control of diction, tone and the progress of the line seemingly conflicts with his experience of cognitive impairment. Where one might expect language that is jarring and fragmented, one finds a modulated calmness. This is a gathered strength and composure, reserved and expended for the sake of the poem. There is nothing here that would suggest anything but a poet’s search for a whole vision through the composition of the poems, with their symmetry, measured beats in a free verse line.
In perhaps my favorite poem, “Yahrzeit,” the poet takes on the burden of self-consoling his youth in a straightforward way as he brings his own father back to life. It is always the son who makes the father, not only the other way around. This is the epic task of the contemporary elegist, just as Phillip Levine and Edward Hirsch have done: the lifelong effort to reify the lost through the language of poetry. One can sense Skloot’s excitement as the rendering of the father is evoked, the parent’s heart breaking inside his son’s broken heart. It’s therefore not surprising that the poem opens with his own birth when his father “was born,” mingling the two. The poem, in full:
Yahrzeit
My father died at fifty-three
fifty-three years ago today.
I remember that the morning
after my daughter was born
in the middle of a long September night
my mother responded to the news
by telling me I had been born
in the middle of an even longer night
and on that night my father drove
home from the hospital, lit a cigar
and climbed through the living
room window. He sat on the fire
escape in the company of a dozen
pigeons and finished his fifth
of Cutty Sark and sack of salted filberts.
This was the rare story my mother
told about him that I could
verify because our former neighbor
from the apartment below sent
an email confirming it. For hours
while she and her parents lay awake
my father’s feet kept time against
the metal ladder just above them
as he sang “Flat Foot Floogie
(with the Floy-Floy)” over and over,
surely in honor of my strange first name.
***
I was named for Flora, my mother’s
grandmother. “Flat Foot Floogie
(with the Floy Floy)” was a jazz song
written nine years before I was born,
the year my parents married. The most
common explanation of the title
is that the Floy Floy is slang for
a venereal disease and Floogie
really means Floozie. My father
often sang this song while dressing
to go out for dinner with my mother,
his way of making me laugh before
they left. I believe my father
understood what the song was about
but had chosen not to argue
with my mother over yet another
point of contention regarding this child
he never wanted. And whenever he sang
it, I would laugh and my mother
would stalk out of the room.
***
My mother told me
without quite telling me
that my father wanted me
aborted. He knew people, she said.
The mob controlled Red Hook
where he operated his chicken
market, so he knew people.
Italian butchers and bakers
on either side of him. The squeeze,
she said. What did I think,
he got by because he was
a nice guy? Protection money,
the rackets, fix anything,
back room, back alley, back door.
He knew people, my mother told me.
***
I was fourteen when he died
so I have now lived fourteen
years longer than he lived.
Half a year ago, an elderly physician
from New York who as a young man
delivered crates of live poultry to
my father’s market in the early 1950s
called to say he was going through
old boxes as he prepared to move
into a retirement community and found
a photograph of my father holding
me in his arms in the courtyard
of our Flatbush apartment building.
He wanted to tell me something
important before he sent the picture:
My father was a lovely man.
And he was so proud of me
because I could recite the entire
Brooklyn Dodgers’ lineup, including
uniform numbers and positions,
when I was three years old.
***
I no longer remember the sound
of his voice. I have forgotten how
he laughed. Photos show him
with more hair than I remember,
an actual smile, more weight,
fewer wrinkles on his face, eyeglasses
always held in his hand when posing.
I no longer remember anything
about him that I have not already
remembered. Almost all who knew
him are gone. If he was still alive
he would be one hundred six.
There is that name again, continually signifying the effort towards individuation. The language is itself that wave of self-establishment and self-loss, continually rising and falling and rising again through tended metrics. It is the crucible upon which Skloot makes sense of his world if only for a moment before he forgets all over again. In “Sabbath,” form and significance coalesce perfectly, the poem circling in on thoughts never spoken but which now must not go unsaid, the grandson helping his grandmother to make chopped liver, and put it on the plate, which is flawed by a crack, the very same dish that her mother used. Continuity, retrieval, and survival.
The book concludes with poems about the interfacing of the poet and the natural world. There is an underlying desperation to bind with what is seen while his mind is still lucid, his pain temporarily assuaged. The final poem, “Simple Gifts,” ends as the first began, with the unending circle of remembrance and memorization, the most human gift of losing and finding:
There it is always accompanied
By her soft smile as the song
Draws to a close and starts anew.
[Published by LSU Press on October 2, 2020, 68 pages, $18.95]