Poetry’s capacity to tell the truth, a truth, any truth — to get at it, embody it, fake it — has been long debated, especially since what might be meant by “truth” is also subjective, fluid territory. The notion of “truth,” of what is real, is perhaps especially italicized when the poetic utterance is meant to approach the poet’s own truth (not “a” bishop or “your” bishop, but “my” bishop) — when the poems feel confessional, autobiographical, and the experiences of the narrator seem very close to those of the poet.
It would be naïve, of course, to presume the complete veracity of any confession or testimony; as Robert Lowell commented in a Paris Review interview concerning his seminal confessional collection Life Studies: “There’s a good deal of tinkering with fact.” Yet in our intensely relative, slippery post-truth political climate, and with so much contemporary poetry blurring into the realm of memoir and staking claims for identities conferred and validated by various personal and cultural traumas, Michael Collier’s My Bishop and Other Poems offers a nuanced foray into what it means to attempt, in language, to recount personal memories and to establish what broader authenticity and significance they might reveal.
With perspicacious courage, wry humor, and vulnerability, and in a mix of short personal lyrics and segmented narratives, including two extended sequences — “My Bishop” and “The Storm” — that could well be regarded as masterpieces, Collier takes on a trinity of interrelated subjects: the deaths of family and friends, the precariousness of safety and belief, and the nexus of guilt, culpability, and ire surrounding a boyhood experience of pedophilia in the Catholic church.
On the surface, these poems — about windows, meadows, lemons, bees, blizzards, a mother’s dementia, a rented coffin, strands of hair in a used book — take as their measure a domestic, quotidian circumference. But as larger, public disasters and disgraces (a plane crash, a sex scandal) intrude upon and shape the everyday lives of these poems’ subjects and speakers, Collier reminds us again and again that there is in poetry a political place for the genuine — that is, for the closely attended-to, paradoxical full menu of experience that, once in a while, yields up, however ephemerally, a sense of something akin to what might be called a truth. This happens for the young narrator of the prose poem “Boom Boom,” who has an encounter in a back alley with the eponymous subject of the poem’s title — “a Chihuahua, not even a dog in my mind”:
Passion flowers grow in a thick vine over Boom Boom’s fence. I have been told the leaves of these flowers are the lances that pierced Jesus’s chest and broke his legs. Boom Boom is whimpering, lying down near a place in the fence through which I squeeze my hand to touch his nose. “Boom Boom,” I say, very quietly, “I love you. You are the only one who understands me.” Afterwards, I feel very small and very large, restrained and freed, and certain there is a purpose to life beyond the one I’ve been given.
There is, of course, a good dose of gentle, self-directed irony and humor in this back alley Road-to-Damascus scenario. Boom Boom? As in the sky thunderously opening up to reveal the big Truth? And yet the narrator tells us at the start of this poem that he has “left his backyard and entered the alley in search of my poetry.” Again, not poetry in general, but my poetry. What an odd thing for a young boy to say, and yet his saying it suggests that for Collier this sojourning into past life experiences is a search for the ineffable something that makes meaning mean something. It is the inchoate longing behind what the boy actually says to Boom Boom’s inhuman presence (and which the adult narrator then says again, in the recounting of the poem) that opens up a place in the self for vision to enter in. For poetry.
Collier’s narrators never lapse into simple nostalgia, indictment, or easy epiphany, and this adds to the credibility of their stories. Even as a recent high school graduate in “My Bishop,” for instance, contemplates his possible future “calling” as a priest, he also makes out with a girl on the family living room floor beneath a framed portrait of Pius XII (“In our house nothing was done without the Pope looking on … I looked up and there he was, Papa, in his white zucchetto”). When that boy, grown to adulthood, confronts at his father’s funeral the Bishop who failed to protect him from a pedophilic priest (a Bishop now publicly disgraced for turning a blind eye), the speaker says,
I pity, dislike, and I’m fond of him.
The truth of this is almost as bearable as the lie.
In “Jefferson’s Bees,” the speaker mentions that his mother “called / Brazil nuts nigger toes — not all the time, though once / was enough to pass that thinking on to me,” and yet later in the poem he acknowledges the devastating impoverishment of such perceptions: “[beehives], like everything at Monticello, restored to an idea / that has not survived its own foreclosures.” It is in the registering and re-registering of events and of responses to them —varied, oxymoronic, partial — that Collier shows us that “truth” is at least in part about our struggle to find it. It is telling that the deeply flawed Bishop of the narrator’s childhood (a “holy” man of deep and detrimental denial) keeps pressing the adult narrator for a “confession.” The narrator refuses to comply, but the poems themselves reveal that the narrator, a would-be priest become poet, has learned that any attempt to “confess” any holy/whole truth must involve perceiving and saying as much as one can of the fractured, the quotidian, the actual, with the understanding that any complete gnosis is, for human beings, impossible. The poet does not need to confess to the old order. Language, poetry, binds him to another kind of petition, listening, utterance.
Likewise, “The Storm” is a tour de force, contrapuntal invention that weaves together the 1982 crash of an Air Florida jet into the Potomac during a blizzard with details of the narrator’s own incipient life as a writer, the violence and criminality of poverty, government, Brueghel, Dada, Charles Lindbergh, a father’s death, Freud, survivor guilt (“There’s a tenacity // the dead have on the living that no living person has on you”), and suicide:
I think of it
as one among many solutions to the problem of living,
different than the others, all of which involve staying alive.
Collier’s engagement with the truth, then, is a matter of waking up. Although he often writes out of dissociated and traumatic memories and dreams (“Last night, I was on a train, sitting at a table in the dining car with my friend Tom. // I was wearing a black cassock, unbuttoned along its length, collarless”), his speakers do wake, and they are watchers of the broken panoply of experience. They take note of the past and of the present, and juxtapose these partial elements. However, this is not a matter of “Looking is Truth, Truth Looking, that is all ye need to know.” Discernment is required as well — it is the difference between a waking dream, perhaps, and being actually awake in the midst of “the problem of living.”
The book concludes with a poem, “Bronze Foot in a Glass Case,” in which the speaker of the poem is the relic itself. This ancient bronze fragment of statuary is Keats’s urn re-imagined, that “still unravished bride of quietness” not apostrophized but rather speaking to us, the poet/viewer/reader, out of the ravishment of time and once embodied personhood:
If you, who are bending close to me,
can look through the glare
of your own reflection, you’ll see
the layer of dust at my heel
and the shadows my toes cast
on the baize. This is where
the waiting ends, this is where
the violence recommences —
in the dust and light
that gathers around me — you
who could not see it
until I told you to look.
It’s all here: recognition, identity, sorrow, empathy, voice. Vision, re-vision, and a call to recall the ruthless patterns of the person, the polis, and of history. We are flawed, the poems suggest, and complicated, and so are our memories, our perceptions, and the stories we make of them. Yet (to paraphrase Blake), we perch on the abyss of our senses five. What we see/feel/smell/touch/hear/taste — what we are urged by art, by poems, to consider — shows us the ancient human need to recollect, to reflect, to make sense of our lives. What could be more guardedly hopeful? More startlingly authentic?
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[Published by the University of Chicago Press, August 17, 2018. 92 pages, $18.00 paperback]