Suddenly Slow, a poetry chapbook by John Lee Clark. Minneapolis: Handtype Press, 2008. $8.00 (pa.).

I’ll get it out of the way and mention that Clark is a deafblind poet. Does that mean we must consider the quality of his work in the light of his condition? Not at all. Clark is a poet, foremost, who happens to be deafblind. The knowledge of his condition serves only to give the reader a little background on Clark’s experiences which color some of his poems.

The collection begins with “Lawn Chair, 1984,” a vivid, tight little portrait into Clark’s experience as a blind adolescent encountering an unfamiliar obstacle. “It was not on the lawn/ until I tripped over it” the poem begins. Unable to see, Clark trusts to his memory to map a path across his lawn, but suddenly there is chair in the way. Later, Clark describes his embarrassment as he tries to hide his condition,

I didn’t want them to know
anything save that I must be one tough boy

to play this strange game
of clambering to my feet and circling

to run and trip over the lawn chair
over and over again.

The poem is heartbreakingly surreal in its depiction of this strange boy playing out the definition of insanity. But Clark reserves sentiment; it is a “strange game” the boy is playing, not a “tragic” one. One imagines Clark retelling the story of these events with a smile, if it’s a true story, of course.

Clark describes the hardships he’s faced. In the poem, “New Student,” Clark describes the viciousness of other deaf students at a deaf school. His first night there, Clark, eager to learn, is “overjoyed/ to be assigned a room/ near the dormitory library”, that is until:

that night some boy
hurled a fact-heavy volume
of The Book of Knowledge
at my sleeping head.

Bloodied and bruised, Clark seeks help from the housefather, but comes to understand that the other boys “feared and attacked whatever/ they did not understand”. Finding no help elsewhere, Clark reacts and makes himself ‘understood’ when another boy “waved his mocking hand” in Clark’s face; Clark lashes out and strikes the boy, “and then I was seen/ bright as day.” It’s a moving and interesting piece about a kind of right of passage. Because he has no real choice, Clark stands up for himself, overcoming questions of self-pity. One wishes, of course, for different circumstances, but Clark has clearly grown from the experience.

“Pears” describes the inevitable intimacy of using the sense of touch as a primary sense. Clark describes placing pears on a windowsill to ripen in the sun. “To learn my pears,” he begins, “I line them up on a windowsill.” He “learns” them by examining them with his hands to test for ripeness. Likewise,

The sun’s finger and thumb
will rub those stems
without kindling them,
choosing to caress
their plump bodies warm.

Clark treats the pairs reverently. “[T]hey will shine/ my kind of light,” he says, of the ripened pears, and goes on to say;

Then I will know
how to bite into my pears
in the kindest way
and how to accept
their sweet forgiveness.

And here, we’re getting to the heart of Clark’s collection; with beautiful language, he’s touching on ideas of intimacy and togetherness. “Long Goodbyes” describes Clark’s memories of guests visiting his parents’ house. He describes the enjoyable time spent in these signed conversations as ‘suddenly slow.’ It is a wistful poem, moving beyond questions of the injustice of disability or of one’s own past tragedies and simply reaffirming life. And that, finally, is what Clark’s poems are all about.

*     *     *

Where We Come From, a poetry chapbook by Doug Ramspeck. Greensboro, NC: March Street Press, 2009. $9.00 (pa.).

Ramspeck’s poems are vivid, to say the least. He paints a portrait of bayou life rich with natural portents. He begins with “Mud Bank” which describes old men fishing a river full of catfish whose “entrails…are occultations”. The black currant trees along the riverbank “snare the wind and try to stir it into auguries.” The men study the brown water, looking for “ancient signs”. Here, Ramspeck introduces one of the major themes of the collection, a focus on the natural world and attempts to derive meaning from it. But Ramspeck isn’t picking daisies; the bayou landscape he describes is brutal, teeming with life and death. Here, there is beauty; much of it is deadly, but beautiful nonetheless (or perhaps that’s why it’s beautiful…).

In the title poem, Ramspeck describes a forbidding but rich landscape;

Our memories are of brackish ponds
that dragged us once into the loam
and now bide their time and ache
to close around our mouths,
like a first love drawing us down

He warns, “Only fools trust the surface of a thing” and later, “Even we ourselves are out to get us,” and concludes by likening “us” to birds of prey, waiting to swoop with “gnarled, sharpened talons”. Ramspeck’s vision sees below the ‘surface’ of things; his descriptions of the natural world turn pastoral poetry on its ear. Likewise, he doesn’t divorce humans from his natural landscape.

But this natural world is impenetrable; the old men trying to glean meaning from the river are trying, but who knows if they’ll ever succeed. Similarly, in their interactions with each other, Ramspeck’s characters have a difficult time discerning the meaning of each other’s actions and rely on spells, potions, and other methods to find answers. “The Secretive Husband” describes a wife who wonders what her husband is up to. She reads relevance into his every action, the way he sleeps with ‘clenched fists,’ the way he snores, the whiteness of his feet. The husband “says he loves her”, but the wife isn’t convinced; “She looks for hidden meaning in his dirty/ shower water swirling down the drain.” She can’t find a satisfactory meaning in these things, so she decides to concoct a potion to get at the truth.

Just as the natural world is difficult to fathom in these poems, so are the suppressed desires of its inhabitants. In Ramspeck’s poems, it is as though the characters are overhearing a language they don’t understand. This language is spoken by rivers and snakes, but also by the animal within us all. Perhaps it’s not that these characters don’t understand; it’s that they won’t listen.

The animal within us is most clear in poems like “Drowned Boy,” which describes a boy who drowned when the ice of a not-quite-frozen river gave way beneath him. But Ramspeck doesn’t lament the child’s fate; “We’d never liked him,” the narrator states. The boy had been a victim of teasing and abuse. The other boys we’re unremorseful, even still; “It was good, we knew, that we’d chased/ him home most days, throwing stones to thump/ at the center of his back.” The implication is that the boy was always doomed and these bullies simply recognized that. The boys are brutal as predators. The poem ends with the simple statement, “…when they dragged him up—/ sopping, frozen, still—he looked just like himself.” It is a resoundingly tragic statement; Ramspeck manages to take a “story-of-the-week” event and craft it into a lasting poem.

-Reviewed by CL Bledsoe