One Night Stanzas

I first came across the work of Howard Good when he sent a poem for inclusion in Read This Issue Fourteen. It was a subtle and beautiful piece without a doubt, but lurking behind it, there was a real sense of menace — of something more than a little sinister, brewing.
That would be a pretty good description of Good’s latest pamphlet, Tomorrowland, a collection of prose poetry published by the wonderful Achilles Chapbooks. Rather than being — like many a prose-poetry pamphlet collection I’ve seen — a series of disparate images or episodes, Tomorrowland is more like a collection of snapshots, all from the same source: an unsettling prediction of life somewhere in our own not-too-distant future.

The book is by no means filled with gratuitous horror, but it is shot through with a sense of darkness that follows you persistently throughout the book. It opens with a stark but seemingly touching poem for a mother who has passed away — Good begins: “My mother scoops snow off the fire escape into the kitchen pot. Her hands dart like birds. I’m four, maybe five” (Love, Death, Etc). However, what starts out as a sweet childhood anecdote soon begins to curl up at the edges. In Part ii, Good tells how “only birds scatter at the approach of dark, and I try not to see too much, the forgeries and desecrations, or the black snow collecting on the floor of my heart.” This is a fine and deeply beautiful — if undeniably creepy — description of the process of mourning, but Good has more to say. In Part iii: “a year since the failed operation, the road into town smeared in blood and entrails”, and by Part iv, the image of the mother peering through a fence from the afterlife, “fingers hooked through the diamond-shaped links”, has become somehow quite disturbing. As you reach the end of this poem, you sense already that Tomorrowland is going to resemble something like an uncomfortable dream — achingly beautiful, but with something you can’t quite name lurking in the shadows.

In places, the darkness that tinges the edges of this book becomes beautiful in itself: “the lighted shop windows in the Victorian gloom of evening, or the firing squad back at the barracks listening to the ball game on the radio” (Lullably for the Nameless), or “envy those in the next chapter, collect adverbs like superstitions” (What Characters Do When We’re Away). Other times, Good is unapologetic, forcing us to look directly at “bodies in the early stages of decay hang[ing] like gray rags from the trees” (The Parable of Sunlight), or “the pile of hacked-off limbs on the hospital lawn, the amputees limping or crawling away” (Homefront). All these visions seem to come from the same imminent future, and rather than reading like a moral fable or warning, Tomorrowland feels more like a simple account — its power and grace really seems to lie in its quiet acceptance, and Good’s determination to find beauty in the horrific. “Oh, how strange” he says in the poem Witness Box, “to wait to be examined and not to know to what extent the testimony will change in the course of transcription.”

Good’s ideas are fabulous. Stories, he says, should always involve “nightfall and a trail of breadcrumbs the crows maliciously eat” (How To Write A Story), and, he claims, “the old songs of vanished birds are released when wood from the trees in which they sang is burned” (Let It Burn). Birds are your constant companions as you travel through Tomorrowland — they are in the town square being fed by “a lifelong student of numbers” (The Parable of Sunlight), singing “in the cadaverous trees” (Homefront), cheeping “in the windowbox with black skull caps like observant Jews” (First Light). All at once, these birds are the bad luck of crows, the hope of doves, the greed of vultures — they seem to be the only ones who are really at home in Tomorrowland; observing the wars, seranading the victories, cleaning up after the deaths. Quite why they anchor the book so powerfully, I’m not sure, but Tomorrowland is both more hopeful and more chilling in their presence.

You walk out of Tomorrowland slightly changed. You have seen things you perhaps wish you hadn’t — “the dead [...] parading past with crumbling, infested faces” — but you have also witnessed the incredible, the beautiful, the terrible — “God dangling from a broken pulley and the stars turning black” (America, America). Above all, though, you have learned something about the future, and you have heard it all in Good’s calm, clear, accepting voice. In Six Predictions About The Future, he really sums it all up: “Children will disappear into silence, flames, the cellars of monsters. [...] The future will be just like the present — so cold it burns.”

You can purchase a copy of Tomorrowland for only $4.00 at the Achilles Chapbooks website.

Want me to review something? Drop me a line to claire@onenightstanzas.com or stick it in the post to Claire Askew, One Night Stanzas, PO Box 23906, Edinburgh, EH1 9AB

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Tags: advice for young writers, publishing, resources for young writers, review howard good tomorrowland, young poets

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 10:01 am and is filed under Publishing (other). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.