In Alan Berecka’s poetry, the presence of God in common people, everyday acts, and ordinary things mostly goes without saying. No need to preach a presence so palpable — only to say “look!” and to say it with a charm and grace that can take your breath away (as in the beautiful poem “For My Daughter,” which begins with a skeptical glance at two legends in which a host in the hands of a priest in despair is transformed into human flesh and ends without a shadow of doubt that there is miraculous love always present always here, always now: “Still, once you have moved on from here, / should you lose faith in your own worth / or in the fact that you are loved, I pray / that this cheap piece of paper on which I / have labored with my simple art might / become a sliver of my own certain heart.” 74)
More often than not, it is laughter that leaves us breathless — and Berecka is a masterful celebrant of that most holy sacrament. In “The Elk” (34), he begins with three words from Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose,” and, before we know it, we are on a cross-country bus trip with a screaming baby, a broken bathroom door “banging out some Satanic lullaby,” an obese Elk, and a poet who tells himself “this is not the bus poem / I had hoped to live or write.” The fleeting thought that “mystical moose” may “appear to hush quiet / conversations only on Canadian buses / on which Elizabeth Bishop rode and wrote. . . . / vanishes as the door slams, / the baby screams, the Elk’s drooling head / kneads my shoulder. The hell-bound bus / swerves and fails to miss a suicidal skunk. / The cabin fills with a sickening odor. / Another mile toward our destination is gained,” and we arrive with a twist at the phrase uttered in resignation in the middle of Bishop’s poem, now a mystical insight, “for even at its most absurd, life’s like that.” (34-35)
At the mystical heart of Berecka’s blue collar poetics — as in all mysticism — is a relentless commitment to telling it (as the poet’s father says) “like it is,” because telling it is the only thing we have that can make it possible to see it. And seeing it, dying and absurd, there is nothing to do with it but laugh (as suggested in the title poem) — whether “it” is one’s childhood, life more generally, or death. In “Blue Collar Poetics,” laughter shared is the moment of redemption. And in “Punxsutawney Phil Forecasts the End of the Romantic Period,” there is laughter between the lines that describe a professor (who has just been reminded of the limited vision of Romantic poets who spent so much time in the woods but — as far as a reader can tell from their poems — never stumbled “across a dead and half-rotten woodchuck”) staring past the poet, a student in his class, “well out into space, / as if he were searching for the home planet of my alien / tongue” (37). We laugh. The professor shrugs and moves on. Life’s like that.
Berecka, like Flannery O’Connor, has little patience for “sublime” vision that closes eyes to the grotesque. Like O’Connor, he is a teller of tales because he believes deeply in the redemptive power of stories that make us look — that witness rather than theorize — and that moves him, as she predicted story tellers would move, to poetry rather than the novel. O’Connor’s description of “a descent through the darkness of the familiar into a world where, like the blind man cured in the gospels, he sees men as if they were trees, but walking” fits the sensibility of Berecka’s poems. And this, as she says, “is the beginning of vision. . .”
The Comic Flaw begins and ends with poems that make past present in persons — great-grandfather Piusus Antonavage in the first poem, who has come from Lithuania. “He pours a glass, drinks / deeply and grins. In a thinning accent he tells me, / Boy, it is not so good to think so much. / What is there to know? Each man has one life. / What does it matter where he breeds or drinks?” (1) And in the last poem, an old Lithuanian priest, a Franciscan, thirty years dead: “Uneasy, I turn to find / my old priest holding two gold cups / which he fills with the tide at our feet. / He smiles, hands me a chalice, / and says, There’s plenty. Let’s drink.” (80)
Yes, plenty. The collection is a Eucharist from beginning to end. Bread and wine have their place, but the sacramental elements might just as well be baseball, popcorn, t-shirts, a puzzled Pope responding to a phrasebook reference to lost luggage, a woodchuck dead and half-decayed — or the poet’s old man flipping a bird. This is holy ground. Take off your shoes. Get comfortable. Enjoy.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
Alan Berecka. The Comic Flaw. Houston: NeoNuma Arts, 2009. ISBN 978-0-974-1623-6-2.