James Arthur's ​The Suicide's Son

Reviewed by Carla Scarano D'Antonio

(Véhicule Press, 2019)

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies
 
“September 1, 1939,” W.H. Auden

Inevitable violence and a nostalgic mood characterise James Arthur’s second collection. Some poems were already published in his pamphlet Hundred Acre Wood (Anstruther Press, 2018), but in the context of this new collection, they appear sharper and more intense. A subtle violence creeps in the lines, freezes moments in tiny details, alienating the subject and leaving the reader suspended in an illusion of observation.
 
The void of our world is contemplated in a relentless, brave disillusionment. It unmasks our reality, revealing an anguishing emptiness that seems redemption-less. This is a world of artificial images, sad and farfetched, and yet colourful, momentarily appealing and entertaining. These images have the quality of a pastiche, nostalgic and funny; they are performances of imaginary past gesta. Thus, reality is fragmented, shattered, pulverised in an attempt to reach the bottom and maybe start again, possibly with more room, more breathing space and time to rewind:

I believe in the power of original sin,
in the wound
that keeps on wounding. The son
of the suicide
becomes a suicide. His own son
becomes a drunk. You’re not meant
to be so unhappy,
you think, so it must be something
that you’ve done;
there must be a reason why you are
the way you are.
 
(“School for Boys”)

The poet retraces his boyhood, which is marked by bullying and fierce fights among boys where he plays both the role of the victim and of the victimiser. His physics teacher provides him with the rule for life: “be one man for the world/and another for yourself.” This suggests a link to the character of Darth Vader in Star Wars, whose “face/is a mask. There is a mask//underneath your mask, underneath your mask,/underneath your face” (“Darth Vader”)
 
A sense of aimlessness seems connected not only to a personal view but also to the wider social and political situation:

Arriving unheard, I haunt the sky
and inseminate the queen before I die.
I am a poetry that celebrates power.
 
I bring. I bring. The white house
is empty. I bomb air. I bomb breath.
My country, ‘tis of thee I sing.
 
(“Drone”)

Myths are dead, like Captain America who is “into the ground” with his apparently “indestructible shield,” his blue, red and white costume and half-mask. A contradictory symbol of “Pax Americana” (“The Death of Captain America”). In this pervasive nihilism, the poetic voice grabs at details to secure a perception of a “reality” that still might exist and that still matters:

           … Man and dog are happy,
          each in the company
of a creature he truly loves – so let’s leave them as they are,
          in the field.
Quiet. No breeze. The red stitching on the softball
          hanging in the air.
 
(“Tree-Planting”)

Yet, there is humour as well in some of his poems. It is an ironic half-smile that surfaces unexpectedly as, for example, in “Ode to an Encyclopedia,” in which the “companion/on beige afternoon” is the “paper brother” that informs on disparate, maybe useless, topics, such as “how to trim a sail,” “how the hornet builds a hive,” the Trevi Fountain, or “the man who shot down the man/who murdered Jesse James.” But artificiality still underlies the poems about nostalgia, such as “Renaissance Fair,” “Model-Train Display at Christmas in a Shopping Mall Food Court,” and “At Hearst Castle”:

Beyond the edges of the model train display, the food court
is abuzz. Gingerbread and candy canes
surround a blow mold Virgin Mary, illuminated from within;
a grapevine reindeer
has been hung with sticks of cinnamon. One by one, kids
get pulled away
from the model trains: Christmas Eve is bearing down
and many chores remain undone.
 
But for every child who leaves, another child appears.
The great pagan pine
catches and throws back wave on wave of light
like a king-sized chandelier, announcing
that the jingle hop has begun,
and the drummer boy
still has nothing to offer the son of God
but the sound of one small drum.
 
(“Model-Train Display at Christmas in a Shopping Mall Food Court”)

These are assembled images, pastiches that mix objects from different origins in order to appeal and entertain in a reproduction that is nevertheless significant, both in its naiveté and its wish to please and reassure the viewer or customer.
 
Lack of cohesion in the external world seems to taint identity as well, in a fragmentation that is almost a process of pulverisation, a mute violence:

              The storm that howled all night has spun off east
and the blown-down leaves, mounded deep, are drying –
 
so employees of the city are out cleaning up, with leaf-blowers,
            stirring up a roar so big, their earmuffs can’t block it,
only blend it –
…
                   
                            … Inside, the leaves
 
grind down to dust. But flying there, they’re so
             delicate. Dragonflies, butterflies. They
             skitter across the air— 
 
(“Roar”)

Revisiting the work of past authors makes the poet reflect on his own work and aims, as in “To Geoffrey Chaucer” and “In Al Purdy’s House”:

I wish I could get your advice
on how to write this second book. I give myself directives
to stay on the subject, to expand,
but the words clot into jelly, or just will not be
whistled up at my command.
 
(“To Geoffrey Chaucer”)

Ambiguity and contradictions, a mixture of the familiar and the unknown characterise these poems, in which there is “a collapse of distinctions/between the real and the unreal,/between what has already/taken place, and what is happening right now” (“In Al Purdy’s House”). There is a suggestion to read “back to front” not only Al Purdy’s collections, but maybe also Arthur’s collection, in a “backward progress” that seems to lead to either nothingness and despair or to a lucid sense of “reality” that is courageous in its lack of coherence and its inevitable deviance from the “right” path, which is alienating.
 
Hence, in “Nostalgia,” Adam and Eve will never be allowed to go back to the garden where an angel stands by the gate, which is a sort of punishment for “something that somebody else had done.” Similar to the poet, the angel can be interpreted as a fallen creature who keeps fighting his battle “And never for a moment/did he put down his burning sword.”
 
This is a compelling collection of poems that emphasises Arthur’s thought, putting into context both less recent and new poems. It develops an understanding of our complex world and present socio-political states in a distinctive, poetic way.

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Carla Scarano D’Antonio lives in Surrey with her family. She obtained her Degree of Master of Arts in Creative Writing with Merit at Lancaster University in October 2012. She self-published a poetry pamphlet, A Winding Road, in 2011. She has published her work in various anthologies and magazines, and is currently working on a PhD on Margaret Atwood’s work at the University of Reading. In 2016, she and Keith Lander won first prize in the Dryden Translation Competition with translations of Eugenio Montale’s poems. She writes in English as a second language.
 
Visit her websites:
http://carlascarano.blogspot.com/
http://www.carlascaranod.co.uk/