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HISTORY KALEIDOSCOPE
Gabriel Rocha
Kevin Prufer, National Anthem
Four Way Books, 2008
Paperback, 82 pages
$15.95
Where Kevin Prufer's previous collection, Fallen from a Chariot, moves through eerily beautiful images of crashing vehicles—a car as it tumbles down an embankment, an airplane as it torpedoes to the ground (and the speaker in it who "fell through the sky,/ my tie whipping the air behind me”) – his latest, National Anthem, follows the course of its predecessor: with a plane perhaps smoldering on the ground, we're asked to look up at parachutes which “gasped in the sun like morning glories” and, later, “tangled in the trees.”
Sharing such spectacular images as a moon which “grew like an empire, then fell like a bomb," the poems in Prufer's new collection begin to coalesce and collapse on themselves until they too seem to lie in common rubble. Prufer does not shy from dreaming up apocalyptic landscapes (a burning moon, a decimated city, a gigantic parachute blanketing a town), summoning a genuine aesthetic of impending or ongoing saturation. In the debris after destruction, broken things start to resemble each other, and the power of the simile, which Prufer yields in surprising and touching ways, is alive and well.
Yet National Anthem succeeds in ways in which its predecessor does not—what came across at times as affected melancholy in Fallen from a Chariot has been refined to a more sustained, melodic, and ominous sadness. With America as a starting point, the poems shuttle forwards and backwards in time, even to the ancient world, as Prufer's kaleidoscopic view of history transmits the sorrows of the rise and fall of empires, the promises of wealth and safety fulfilled and inevitably shattered. What's more, the voices in the poems speak decisively from their locales—whether Ancient Rome, Imperial Russia, or contemporary America—as inanimate objects (“And the shopping center said, Give me, give me”) or as the dead (as with the corpse of Alexei Romanov, the hemophiliac son of Czar Nicolas II coolly commenting of his own excavation, “They picked me up. My neck went slack”). Though empires gyrate and collapse, their remains continue to speak and feel and want.
Effortlessly, Prufer weaves his threads of repetition at the microscopic level of diction as well, as when “the car ticked like the contented in the catatonic snow,” where the alliterated “c” seems to be set into motion by the onomatopoeic “tick.” Lines often stretch in solid iambs across the page, only to cut sharply and continue directly beneath, like an uncertain staircase, as if a sentence were crumbling down the page in mid-breath. In such moments, the effect is to distend the traditional spine of a poem which strives to cover the full expanse of the page.
These gaps in the body of a poem reinforce how convincingly the inanimate in National Anthem are given voice – indeed, only if the largeness of empty space is capable of breath can the inert speak or act alongside the living. When, in the title poem, a “flag applauded in the wind,” the purpose of the flag – to symbolize and celebrate, regardless of the impending decadence which may surround it—draws a stark contrast with the downward progression of the poems and the repeated images of falling parachutes, ashes snowing down from the moon, dwindling empires. Despite an aura of defeat, the poems gain a generative impulse out of their simultaneous celebration and mourning, searching for nuggets of beauty in the heaps overwhelming decadence.
No empire lasts forever, and Prufer has achieved an elegy of sorts to his country at a moment when it needs to soberly assess the wreckage. For all the challenges that decline may pose, National Anthem reminds us how after a multitude of disasters, the past may yet sustain us for another moment, as we pause to take in its quiet and steady erosions, “so beautiful,/ I know you'd agree,/ and terrible.”
http://fourwaybooks.blogspot.com/2008/11/interview-with-kevin-prufer-author-of.html