The title of Catherine Pierce’s 2007 Saturnalia Book Prize winning collection points to the final short section of the book – a series of seven poems, each of which begins with last words attributed to a famous person, from Billy the Kid to Pancho Villa. The final lines shed light on the whole: “How else / can we live forever? How else / can we write ourselves in?” (66) Pancho Villa’s associates – like the poet – “cannot help but imagine.”
The first section consists of eight “love poems” – to sinister moments, the word lonesome, a blank space, America, the phrase Let’s get coffee, DooWop, longing, and fear – that pretty thoroughly traverse the spiritual landscape of contemporary America (and do it in an oddly loving way). To America, the poet writes “teach me how to strut. // … You’re the one I want // to hate, with all your swagger and bravado, / and of course you take me home / every time. Who could resist?” (5) Oddly loving… “I love the asphalt taste of you, / your acid smell and your hunger and I love / how, afterward, you roll over and snore / like a locomotive before I even catch my breath.” There is a fire here that lights up landscapes of peculiarly self-destructive love: “In bed, / you fell me like a redwood. I am lost / in your factory body…” (5). Somehow it seems appropriate that this love poem to a peculiar country follows a love poem to a blank space and lies in the middle of a section that moves toward love poems to longing (“You’ve left me / wanting nothing”) and fear (“all bombast / and mystery. Everything / yours for the taking”) while it paves the way for the long road trip of section two.
The heart of the book is (adopting the title of one of the poems in the second section) a “cross-country song.” Pierce writes about places she has passed through as well as places she has lived with affection, but also with an eye that is not buying myths of innocence: “Oh country, you are an animal to yourself. / Let me roll in the dust alongside you.” (15) The object under observation is the observer as much as the observed: “Some days I watch myself / in the third person, speak to her / in the second. I say: I will / meet you in sleep. I will know you / by your stillness and your shaking.” (19) There are beautiful recollections of place here – “Fat Tuesday,” “Retrospect,” “Memphis” – but they are also recollections of time, as in “Adolescence”: “You dream yourself into every fairytale, the grisly / versions where the prince’s eyes / run blood and the girl disappears / into the wolf’s dark throat. / You understand the good // must be punished…” and so would be “the queen whose word // is wicked, who conjures smoke / and poison.” (26) Everywhere in these poems, there is energy just below the surface ready to explode. And the surface is explored the way it might be explored on a road trip – Graceland, Tupelo, Moab, Amarillo, Gallup – where everything you see in passing is new, and it makes the world strange in passing.
This is a beautiful collection, full of music and light on a landscape that could be abandoned as bleakly familiar. Pierce has written herself in with grace, humor, and insight that make the book a pleasure to read.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
Catherine Pierce. Famous Last Words. Philadelphia: Saturnalia Books, 2008. ISBN 978-0-9754990-7-8.