Most of us take as a given the impossibility of knowing another person in full, but can the same be said about ourselves? What gives any of us the authority to speak about our own experiences, let alone those of others, when memory, motivation, and intention are such fallible things? These are some of the questions that Brian Brodeur raises and grapples with in his fourth collection of poetry, Some Problems with Autobiography. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1978, Brodeur has been mining his life and those of others for the past two decades, producing poems of linguistic richness with the narrative heft of short stories. Consider “To an Absence,” a sonnet from the new volume:
The kid in latex gloves at Radford’s Beef
brown-bags my five-pound brisket, saying, “Dude,
have a blessed day.” I do the math — you’d be
a teenager, his age. Across the counter,
the brisket drips (the kid grinning, “My bad”),
but all I feel for you is gratitude
for the life your death allowed — my wife and daughter
I’d like one day to see I might deserve.
And would deserve, I think, if I could live
without the guilt I tongue like a decayed
incisor I’ve refused to have removed —
afraid what joy I’ve known might disappear
without a counter-pain to root it here.
The kid says, “Wait,” and stamps my brisket PAID.
Brodeur sets the scene with such realism that we don’t grasp its figurative implications until the halfway point, when the poem reveals its subject matter. In hindsight, the most innocuous details — the latex gloves, the five-pound brisket, “My bad” — tell the story of an unplanned pregnancy and abortion as the poet edges toward an explicit disclosure. The past doesn’t so much intrude into the present as meld with it, a fusion made possible by the force of the poet’s language. But Brodeur knows that words damn us as much as they liberate us, and though the final line might be misread as a ringing statement of self-absolution, he is too good a poet to let himself off the hook so easily. The entire sonnet “drips” with the sinister atmosphere of the butcher shop, and the lines “I’d like one day to see I might deserve. / And would deserve, I think, if I could live / without the guilt …” speak to the poet’s doubt that this grief will ever diminish — and his reluctance to let it go. “To see I might deserve” is not the same thing as deserving; it suggests that, if he doesn’t find himself deserving, he would at least like to deceive himself into believing that he is. It’s this ironic self-awareness and underlying sense of futility that make the poem so devastating.
Like many poets, Brodeur is more guarded about his personal life in his first collection, Other Latitudes (University of Akron Press, 2008), though its portraits of outlaws, rebels, eccentrics, and everyday monsters align him with society’s dispossessed. These poems have something of a novelist’s sympathy and affection for even his most despicable characters, and their plain style is flexible enough to accommodate voices other than the poet’s. In “Figure Drawing,” the best and longest of the poems in this mode, a teenage artists’ model recounts an inappropriate relationship with a professor. She intersperses the deadpan tercets of her narration with excerpts from the professor’s love letters, written in prose that’s deliberately more lyrical and traditionally “poetic” than the lineated verse that surrounds it:
You asked why I wept the other night while you undressed. I used to have control over my feelings. (I used to pride myself on just how much control I thought I had.) But when I watched the robe fall from your shoulders and slide down the meat of your back, there was such a glare … It was like opening a door onto snowfall — that violent whiteness; the paleness of your back — and I had no control over it, I had no control over any of it.
My work, your body — I see no difference now. People like you and I — people of feeling — for us, art is a pleasure that must be suffered through. [italics per text]
Like the girl in his poem, the poet never allows himself to be entirely seduced by pretty words — except when recollecting and reenacting his protagonist’s objectification. It’s a testament to Brodeur’s talent that some of the most beautiful passages in Other Latitudes are written in the voice of a predator, but these interludes also betray his distrust of his own gifts.
The plain style persists in Natural Causes (Autumn House Press, 2012). The chronicles of blue-collar breakdown that comprise Brodeur’s second collection represent an expansion of the narrative mode developed in Other Latitudes. The best of them (including the title poem, “The Clearing,” “Human Services,” and “Two Disused Farms in Kempton, Indiana”) have the accessibility and addictiveness of true crime television. Even so, the book is a little too long, and the reader trying to distinguish between fact, fiction, and hearsay will often be disappointed, though the dedication page in the back provides some clues. Amid the tales of dysfunction, there are a handful of lovely lyrics, like “A Late Spring,” which even manages to smuggle a rhyme scheme from Sylvia Plath’s “Parliament Hill Fields” into a collection dominated by free verse. Brodeur writes of the neighborhood house finches:
They don’t trust me. Who could blame them?
But they need my charity in this bare season
before the flowers fill the air with seed,
and so they accept without question
whatever crumb I toss them, tearing
apart the crust of a stale bran muffin we share.
The same, of course, cannot be said of a poet’s readers, at least when he is lucky (or unlucky) enough to have attracted some discerning ones. Only sycophants “accept without question” a poet’s every word; the threat of rejection, on the other hand, always looms large for him, especially when a drastic shift occurs in his work. So it was no small risk for Brodeur to follow two books of free verse with a collection of formal poetry, Every Hour Is Late (Measure Press, 2019). The volume features sonnets, a ghazal, a villanelle, and nonce stanzas whose varied rhythms and intricate rhyme schemes recall those of the metaphysical poets. The limber lines have gained the muscle of iambic pentameter — a friend to Brodeur even in his early work. Perhaps a more profound development, though, is the elevated diction. Plainness has given way to a dazzling sonic and metaphorical density:
The surfaces stipples, spattering, unclean,
and trickles its litany,
though what it signifies I can’t quite glean —
its dos and don’ts spurting tinny
sprinkles that sound more like grievances.
As whorls of algae roil,
commingling with spore-drift, the whole backwash
taints and tints with oil.
Each braided wavelet choruses
in one long sigh, a tinkled prattle-plash.
This poem, one of Brodeur’s finest, demonstrates what can be gained from a major stylistic departure. As in “To an Absence,” seemingly innocent word choices — unclean, litany, grievances — deepen in thematic resonance the further one reads, but this heightened attention to meaning is balanced by the pleasure the poet takes in the sounds of the words for their own sake. In my book, this poem (called “Babble”) takes its place alongside a small handful of Great American Creek Poems, including Robert Frost’s “Hyla Brook” and James Merrill’s “Menu,” which Brodeur reverently echoes. The only thing that gives me pause is the epigraph: “No Amnesty — Go USA — Go Home,” attributed to a roadside sign in Ohio. Brodeur is addicted to signs and signposting, often in the form of epigraphs, and the impulse is essentially a narrative one, a storyteller’s eagerness to help the reader make sense of events. But in a lyric like this one, where compression of language takes precedence over story, there’s no need for such devices; most readers of this book will see the parallels between American political discourse and the description of the creek (the poem’s title is hardly subtle). It’s as if the poet is embarrassed by the thought of having his work mistaken for a “simple” nature poem.
Writing political poetry is always a challenge, and Brodeur has met it better than most. Some Problems with Autobiography, Brodeur’s best collection to date, continues his wrestling with the angels of form and the State. A quieter book than its predecessor, Some Problems relies less on such devices as epigraphs and long titles; rather, the poems, like “Barcode Ode,” are allowed to speak for themselves:
Checksum and glyph. Razor-slit gaps between
start-markers. Quiet zone. Each explains
everything it knows in silent lines
packed tight as eyelashes, the teeth of a comb,
a ventilator’s bellow-squeeze become
stamp-sized. A city in fog, the skyline wan …
This poem’s figurative language displays an inventiveness that George Herbert might have admired. Brodeur’s slant rhymes, which could be scattershot in his previous collection, have acquired a new exactitude and tend toward consonance. Yet for all the exuberant language, the poem’s subject matter (a friend dying in a hospital, presumably of COVID-19) is grim and slow to reveal itself. Although the poem’s final stanza appears to take refuge in metaphor, with visual comparisons bordering on the whimsical (“mute catalogs / dense as baleen, thin as a centipede’s legs”), Brodeur acknowledges the inadequacy of his own language to convey the experience at hand (“Forgive what words offend”), one of several apologies scattered throughout this most penitent and conscientious of his books.
Another memorable pandemic poem is “The Carpenter’s Tale,” written in Dante’s terza rima and spoken by an “essential worker” tasked with building coffins in a high school gym. As the casual asides and stray details accumulate, the horror mounts:
We run through two-by-fours and they bring more —
wash, rinse, repeat. I mean, we’re getting paid,
but after so long it occurs to me:
my god, they really need this many made?
Despite the formal constraints, Brodeur inhabits the tradesperson’s voice as convincingly as he did the voices of misfits and miscreants in his first two collections. Here, his lyric and narrative impulses finally fuse in a modern vision of hell and leave the reader itching to know what else he might accomplish in this form, a notoriously difficult one to pull off in English. (Another top-notch, as yet uncollected example, “After Visiting a Former Student in a Psychiatric Unit,” won this year’s Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry.) The best poems in Some Problems with Autobiography have a weight and finish rare in contemporary American verse, and we can be grateful to Brodeur for fashioning the stuff of his life and ours into durable art.
[Published by Criterion Books on February 21, 2023, 70 pages, $24.99 hardcover]