“Poetry is not about making things happen,” claims poet-critic Donald Revell, “That’s what language does. Poetry is about making language happen.” The poems in Glenn Sheldon’s first full-length collection, The Bird Scarer, live up to this decree and then some; under Sheldon’s guidance, words find so many new ways to happen, that a palpable energy burns off the pages. Time and again, phrases and sentences beg a second (even, third) reading, not because their meaning is obscure, or vocabulary twisted, but because the language has been kicked in the caboose. The poems reveal, strip down, and rebuild in exhilarating ways—not “Ha-Ha” exhilarating, but wake-up the senses (as well as the sensibilities) “Aha” exhilarating, as in the poem “Class Wars,” which explicates the art scene in 1980s Chicago. Here the speaker describes the self-conscious gallery artist as “trying to be discreetly visible // in his or her black and expensively / pensive clothing . . . .” There is an “artist look,” which is not so different from the “poet look,” which is not so different from what is hawked on Madison, or (since this is Chicago) Michigan, Avenue. Likewise, the speaker acknowledges the small-in-salary/“we came for the food” attendees, among whose ranks he counts himself: “A free night on the town was nothing / to sneeze at. The cheese was often / cut into cubes as if cubism, at last, / was profitable.” Sheldon’s wit packs a punch in this, as well as other, poems by playing sound into meaning(s).
Although Bird Scarer’s geographies ultimately range from Boston to Cuba and further south, the central perspective is that of an urban transplant, from the East coast to Chicago, where, as the new kid in town, the speaker can see himself and his adoptive city, with a quasi-voyeuristic eye. A healthy dose of postmodern skepticism—“I’m on Clark Street in dark / pants; all I know is how not to be a ghost,” and three pages later: “I’m here, wherever that is, / where everyone dresses in black like vampires”—informs each poem, while the core value under-girding the collection as a whole, is its honesty and, therefore, vulnerability. The narrator’s playing with cards, but he shows us their faces: I’m new in town, I’m out of work; I’d rather read in the library than get sucked into the grind. The poems’ observations arise organically from the combustion of brain cells colliding with each new piece of information.
But the poems are not confessional; the speaker is addressing an alter-ego. We are privy to the mental contractions of one blessed and damned with the ability to view his life from the outside, a tourist “visiting” his own dailiness with a quasi-voyeuristic stance of interest/disinterest, compassion—and detachment. The perspective is nearly always from above: in one poem, the protagonist/narrator is standing on an El platform (“higher than the blind /rooftops”), in another, he rides a double-decker bus; elsewhere, he is situated in his own imagination, hypothesizing about the future: “Our meal / will taste of ports and less populated / palaces just down river.” This aerial view gives a cinematic scope to the poems’ settings. And, cumulatively, we come to see that language both connects, and disconnects: “But the word will not / be denied height / or aerial view.” What could be a trope of “distancing” is actually free-ing; staying connected, while stepping back and acknowledging how any word we think or utter is, by definition, an abstraction; an attempt from “out of the body” to give name to the inexpressible knowledge of the purely sensate.
One of the biggest challenges for a writer today is bridging the gap between postmodern blasé banality and a beating heart. Sheldon, in honest, sad, funny-true poems, meets the challenge. The Bird Scarer has the feel of being born of a wise, fully formed intelligence, one that engages at the same time that it reminds: we are all, to some extent, posing; not just the artists, in their seriously dark de rigueur opening-night garb, nor the wealthy, or the tourist . . . all of us are dancing through our days, somewhere between what is actual and what is imagined.
reviewed by Priscilla Atkins, Holland, Michigan
Glenn Sheldon. Bird Scarer. Červená Barva Press, 2008. ISBN 9780615171678.