Café Alibi
by Todd Swift
DC Books, 2002
Reviewed by Donald McGrath
For a number of
years now, Todd Swift has made his life in Europe,
first in Budapest and then in
Paris and London, where he now resides. His European
residency figures
prominently in his latest book of poems, Café Alibi.
“Autumn
for Beginners,” Swift’s farewell to Budapest, evokes
that city well in its “dog-eared history,” its contrary
particulars of gold leaf
and shit—dogs will continue to play their misanthropic
role in history and on
the streets—and its blend of bitterness and melancholy.
A popular notion has it
that Hungarians, the males in particular, are much
afflicted by the latter
malady—a product, some suggest, of identification with
too many historical
defeats. Embedded in unrepaired walls, “50-year-old
bullets” keep the sour
memories alive. But there is a kind of vitality, too,
in the new capitalist
future represented by the city’s “shaven-headed,
moonlighting mobsters.”
Defeat of a
personal nature provides the controlling thread of
“Sheer Speculation,” which plays out
nicely—or pays out, I should say—as if from a spool.
The narrator entertains the
idea that all those who once spurned or rejected “us”
might be found together at,
for example, some deserted Eastern European railway
station where “the words
we used to woo them” are “tacked to dingy notice
boards.” The “we” here
indicates that the speaker is thinking—in deference to
the ex-communist
location—collectively, lamenting on behalf of all
who have ever been
spurned in love, unfortunates who “sip at short
straws.” Although the poem’s
conceit initially suggests a pinched or frail ego, its
execution clears large
enough a space for whimsy that one is ultimately
grateful for the speaker’s
plight. Translation: its loss is our gain.
I was intrigued
by the conjunction of fascism and fetishized
extreme-weather gear in “Winter Sports,” in which
flare-toting
members of Joerg Haider’s Freedom Party sweep down an
Austrian slope
“celebrating past heroic errors.” Faced with what one
might call the North Face
of fascism, the narrator turns to the more earthy
charms of some Katja in
bicycle pants—sex insulates against ideology—who in
turn recalls “summers
misspent / speeding parcels to law firms.” There is the
sense that urgency about
the law might take on a broader meaning if the boys and
girls of winter ever get
their way.
In most mortals,
impending apocalypse can produce a sudden feverish
desire for home. We want not
only the hearth but the crib as well. “The Last Days of
St. Lambert” takes
us back to Swift’s birthplace amid a raging fire that
spares only the porches of
the houses. It’s a singular irony, indeed, that leaves
thresholds intact but no
place to go beyond them. Churches that formerly
administered visions of the end
are swept away by it, as if the soil on which they
stood held nothing but
. . . a small collection: one girl,
an
arrowhead, a boy, a pierced American
coin,
through which his eye could see
a
roaring sun, and her red hair.
The volume seems
haunted at times by anticipations or descriptions of
catastrophic loss, the
enfeebling effects of which come through in faint
auditory signals appropriate
to the occasion. “Hull Losses,” which evokes the
sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk in the Barents
Sea, gives
us:
all
hands knocking out Morse
with
spoons on bent hulls, the high-tech //
surroundings
inexplicably silent
Another poem
imagines its narrator stepping out to accomplish some
mundane task and falling
victim to a terrorist’s bomb. The corresponding
auditory moment here is composed
of the quieter and more sinister detonations of pure
contingency as expressed
by:
Hume’s
billiard
balls
on the smooth green table,
clicking
one against the next…
The narrator in “Descriptions of Love,” which
compares the experience of being in a relationship to a
“mirror you don’t want
to break,” nonetheless hears “the sound parcels of
glass make sliding / into a
torn plastic bag.”
Spoons, billiard
balls, a broken mirror—common objects take the great
catastrophes indoors, into
the domestic space of kitchen, recroom, bathroom. It is
as if they actually
enabled the narrator to inhabit those vaporized spaces
floating just beyond the
orphaned thresholds we found in “St.
Lambert.” At one point, in
“The More Deserved,” we
actually find him waiting behind a door ready to
receive some failure as if it
were something he ordered and now awaits with eagerness
or resignation or both.
The
day we least deserve grand failure,
we
will receive it at the door, delivered
by
gloved hand, tipping for the letter.
There are many
fine lines and phrases throughout the volume. “War
Effort,” for example, gives us
gems like “sucking on fag-ends for a trope,” and
“Sassoon flashing Fritz his
neurasthenic bone.” Many of the short poems exhibit
great concision, although a
few, like “Hume’s Billiard
Balls,” are slight in isolation and best read (as I
have attempted to
show in the case of this one) against the backdrop of
other poems in the
volume.
One of poetry’s
oldest strategies is to present us first with
significant detail or an accretion
thereof, and then use this as the springboard for
philosophical or existential
questions. This dialogue can be a tricky matter,
though, since the questioning
must be consonant—or in a finely tuned dissonance—with
its occasion. The point
of departure for “Critical
Theory” is the poet Philip Larkin’s unseemly collapse
in a WC, his face
pressed against a burning pipe, his powers of
expression stripped back to the
infantile “hot, hot.” The questions that arise from
this are full of high
sentence: “Can any ointment reconfigure / the rude
defacement of our loss?” And
a couple of lines later, still within the same
ascending arc: “Is it talent’s
willful fate to miss the boat, /to choke like the
candle just put out, / to lie
beneath human dignity and rot?” I wonder whether these
interrogations are not
pitched too high. Within the strict framework of the
poem, these lines in their
expansiveness appear untroubled by the dire economy of
Larkin’s last words. Are
they meant to implode under their own weight? Is
self-parody intended? I don’t
get the sense that they are, that it is.
“At
Meeting, Parting” also proved similarly
problematic. Lines such as “Love has safely blinkered
me to any other love” and
“As I love another and yet! will always do so” seem
to perpetuate age-old
conceits in timeworn phrases. Moreover, the poem moves
haltingly, pausing to
cinch apposite emotions between its frequent em-dashes.
I found myself wishing
for an ironic stance outside the lines, wanted to see
the high-romantic diction
bracketed.
This is not to
suggest that irony is absent from the volume. Indeed,
as I’ve already indicated
in relation to “Sheer
Speculation,” Swift is capable of a healthy dose of
distance. Moreover,
he can also use it in combination, as a sly lead-in to
effects of sweetness. In
one poem, which begins by comparing his marriage to
“water running / in a bathtub with no
plug,” the narrator is initially seized by the aptness
of the image but
moves beyond the distancing of aesthetics to seriously
address his wife’s
concern in a way that takes them to a shared memory of
“gardens in Istanbul.”
Then, too, there is the fact that, in the mid-90s,
Swift worked as a copy editor
for the publisher of Penthouse Magazine. “Penthouse
Revisited” delightfully
cranks up the clichés used to showcase female flesh. We
see “cocoa-buttered”
torsos laid
over a simply blazing turquoise
backdrop
of parrot-green palm and chlorinated blue,
or in the hot horse-dusky barn, on hay bales…
The longer poems
in the volume often adopt a casual, conversational
style that belies the effort
that actually went into their construction.
“Intergalactic Travel” forms one long
sentence that develops unfalteringly over 30 lines. Yet
Swift’s awareness of
structure is sometimes accompanied by a compensatory
urge to muck things up, to
wreak havoc. This is actually the driving force behind
“Seven Eights are Fifty-six,” which refers
self-consciously
to the poem’s structure of seven eight-line stanzas.
The narrator initially has
us believe that he would like to travel into other
worlds like “a bold
children’s character” to “defeat the source of evil.”
The portal he imagines for
himself is a World War II calendar illustration of a
woman and her daughter
dressed in canary yellow at the butcher’s. As he draws
this Andrew Wyeth style
of scene, he seems to forget his original hero’s
mission and would now like
nothing better that to slip into the picture in his
“best yellow suit” and “tear
the page off the calendar” inside the calendar image
and let “all of time’s hell
/ rattle loose.” He’d have the butcher and the wife
embrace, the little girl
pick her nose, or skip rope, or leap into a puddle—“mud
would be good for all
these people.” Or maybe he could step up beside the mom
and daughter and,
standing in for the missing Dad,
tip my Panama hat, and order
some baloney
so that I could sit outside in the wartime sun,
eat my way into history, or out it its cartoon.
Donald
McGrath is a Montreal-based translator and writer. His
first book of poems,
At First Light, was published by Wolsak and Wynn in
1995.
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