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It is hard to avoid Monster related comments! Bryan Dietrich’s latest book, long in gestation and the making, is something of a masterpiece. One of the very special things about The Monstrance is the way in which Bryan Dietrich expertly deepens and matures the initial ideas and insights he had about the presence and the influence of the Monster. He does this, building upon the Frankenstein tale and taking it into his own life and ours, making a new fable which is sometimes delicate and sometimes abrasive, both threatening and carnivalesque, disruptive, troublesome, entertaining, dangerous. Such development is the mark of a major talent operating at a new level of imagination, a richly honed skill with language and its effects on our imaginations. The poem also operates on our sense of pattern and deviation, form and presence. I have seen some of these poems earlier, and heard some of them – read. Some sidle off into the nuances of story and character, some grab your sense of the everyday and the Gothic qualities of the monstrous, and throughout the whole, very cohesive, narrative there is a finely linked spine of form, and of concern about identity, belief and love. Despite one interpretation of the title ‘Monstrance’
ie a Monster – rather than the offering of ‘the host’
– this fine collection is not bodged together with odd leftover
pieces – nuts and bolts like the Monster Frankenstein put together.
It’s demonstrably a perfect whole, although written over several
years. Asking Bryan about some of it, I was informed that it is a
‘midrash’ – a Rabbinical form which aimed to fill
in gaps in the Torah – and so here it is used to fill in gaps
in the Frankenstein story. This poem sequence concerns an everyman wandering or in flight through confusion, rejection, self-development, love, growth and journeying. Yet it is also the Monster’s coming to consciousness, which takes place with the notable absence of a father, the master. This questioning for a father figure runs throughout the book, linking issues variously about parenting, religion, nurturing and social justice. Initially the father/master rejects his creation and the Monster experiences instead some undermining bullying from the hunchback, who reminds him he doesn’t have a brain. Although he is stitched together from fragments stolen from corpses and other bodies, he has now a sense of questioning about form and wellbeing. As soon as the villagers attack the castle with fire, he and the hunchback are sacrificed to their anger – but he can repay the meanness of at least one of his tormentors. The hunchback, less than a Monster, in this economy, never makes it from the roof. Some of the poem sequence is a love story. The Monster finds true
love after meeting the Gypsy in her caravan. She is also an outcast,
and unites the unusual, she too is ‘piecemealed’. He is
both found and finds himself, realising ‘how masters can be
chosen, how shadows can take you in, how songs, Gypsies, Monsters,
all, are cobbled from desire’. This is a form of freewill but
very much bound in love. And there are some fascinating moments when
the erotic – two blue wet bodies – is suddenly intruded
on by the strange – no idea where the Monster’s heart
comes from, and imagining he has a range of influences each from his
body parts so when ‘the Monster nodding’ dreams and imagines,
the Gypsy, the Monster and the readers wonder ‘whose grasp,
whose penchant for eggs and broccoli’ affects him. ‘Daguerreotype’, the arrival of the carnival, as a symbol
of revolt and celebration, of alternative energies, is a favourite
of mine. Here, the carnival itself is brought to life, texture, colour
and sound in the intermixing of words such as ‘limb’ and
‘breath’, ‘seminal’, a new start – with
the disruption and offer of the ‘hurdy-gurdy/and conch music’,
the sudden arrival of the senses in the sound, thealliteration and
richness of sudden colour: Moving into the viewpoint of the Gypsy takes place immediately after we’ve seen her dicing with her naming of him as freak, and creating the unfamiliar through the eyes of the Gypsy works well. She’s also aware of how he is ‘too much like a circus himself’, a living palimpsest of different bits and pieces – too much a mix. Theirs is a love story in which he is seen as ‘awkward’ but full of grace, his Gothic mixture of loving ‘lightning, lace/graveyard picnics’, part of his own monstrous conglomerate of parts, but also very human – (‘Constantinople’). Whenever the tone becomes highly romantic it can then be undercut by the ironic comic, such as, ‘Okay, maybe we weren’t made for each other’, particularly appropriate given the Monster’s origins, but it does mean for the Monster and the Gypsy that neither forces a version of self on the other. The Gypsy is aware of the danger and of his need, and equally keen on ending up ‘half-axled off some precipice, lost in wood’ (‘Ingoldstadt’), like a version of little red riding hood – offering a new view on the attraction of the Monster. The crossroads and contracts she mentions are about behavioural rules, as much as the norms of appearance and laws. While the poem talks of disturbance, the flinging free of the imagination
is also balanced by the recognisably tight structure of the whole,
the rhyme, alliteration – so ‘destination’ and ‘hesitation’
– the reversal of the normal way round, suggests disturbance
and options. They are very varied, these poems. ‘Florence’ is about the moment when the Monster left, possibly for the lover of the doctor, on whom he first imprinted, in ‘God’. The poem hurtles through fairy tales, the oddness, the edginess, echoed in the rhyme: ‘girls seeking sex, axe, something perilous to nuzzle’ and tales of an old wizard. It goes deeper and deeper into myth and legend as it gets closer to ‘Transylvania’, then ‘Venice’, recalling previously making men out of clay or crypts and wrestling with the dead, burning out, alienating. The Lame Priest’s Exegesis series is not as celebratory. It focuses on treachery, trickery and power games, but here Bryan Dietrich explores the themes of sexual awakening seen as deviant, of mortality and ageing, death, life from life or death and the role of religion, whether Christianity, in the main, or at one point, a fling with Satanism, which ended up with stealing a goat. Life is a card game which you cannot win, ‘what then, when God of Trumps demands his borrowed portions back?’ (‘On the Anastasis of Monsters’). Reading The Monstrance as a whole reminded me that with Bryan Dietrich’s work you need to pay more attention to the complexity of the poetry, because he is a master of his craft, and the tricksiness, the facility with complex rhyme, lurks beneath the surface of the story, nurturing it along, intertwining and reiterating, revisualising, reminding with reference, rhyme. ‘On the Anastasis of Monsters’ set me off exploring back to the poetry of my student days, asking, is this Virgilian? Or Dante?, suggesting the descent into hell, referencing Dante’s wood, and I wondered if this indicates that the priest is in purgatory? I realised I had spotted terza rima, favourite of Dante, which find was corroborated later by Bryan. The priest’s tale is of splattered toads, girls who believe their drowned bodies will float back to land, dismembered corpses, despair, then mortality, brought up to date with references to slipping in the shower, body fluid, brain matter perhaps going down the plug hole, the little that’s left of us as we die and the way in which, while the body renews itself bit by bit, the brain never does. In ‘Absalom’, brother eats brother, the strangeness evoked
by ‘mandible’, the everyday by ‘sleep strange sandals’.
This concerns one reason for going to hell. His childhood lies undercut
his potential for getting to heaven, when actually you cannot ‘buy
your way into someone else’s/mansion’. This priest is
a doubter. Every thought he has had of sex is underhand, seen as deviant,
hidden. So in ‘On Connections’, death is wound, Gothic,
swamp-like, satanic, into birth and temporary life – it’s
hard to credit his claim ‘I found Jesus’, when the embrace
of death is always so close in the lame priest’s view of things: Questions and quests for religion and belief run throughout the poem sequence. For the Lame Priest, his own darkness undercuts that hope – so the line, ‘It should be a bigger mystery than it is’, reveals his own searching, the deceit of the journey, where religion offers some answers, ultimately undercut. Mystery and mortality underpin the whole, but beyond the Lame Priest section there is both a sense of investment for the Monster and Gypsy in love, temporary and threatened and patched though it might be, like Monster himself, and an underlying desire for established religion to offer something greater. I might have discovered an example of terza rima and sniffed out
something like a Petrarchan sonnet with a difference, but the interlocking
nature and the deliberate extension and difference enabled by tight
control of innovations in established poetic conventions and forms
was more unlocked in email dialogue. As most of this review is my
own thoughts on and responses to the poem sequence, I will use Bryan’s
elucidation of poetic plan and enactment to offer ways into further
exploration of the rhyme and form. He says: ‘the great majority
of the poems use a pretty strict syllable count, there are Sonnets
and Double Sonnets, "The Monster and the Gypsy" uses a weird
reverse backward rhyme scheme where the last line of section one rhymes
with the first line of section two (and so forth), all of the Gypsy
Letters are a new kind of Double Petrarchan Sonnet unique to me as
far as I know (each with two double sestets and a double couplet for
a total of 28 lines), I have one Terza Rima, one Ballad, one Pantoum,
a run-of-the-mill iambic rhyming poem, and then the penultimate poem,
"The Monster's Last Lesson", which is based on "The
House That Jack Built" (or on Elizabeth Bishop's "Visits
to St. Elizabeth's"). Lots of forms, but also lots of influences,
particularly Bishop and Shelley (both of them), but also Anne Sexton
and Cynthia Macdonald and William Trowbridge and my mentor at the
time, Scott Cairns.’(March 15, 2013). We finish the poems of the Master with his musings on books to take should you be on a deserted island, and his awareness that his relatives are losing limbs and his own are also falling away. Ironically?, fittingly?, someone who dismembered corpses to construct a creature he rejected is himself fearing dissolution and dismemberment . The final sequence is for the Monster. ‘Monster and little Miss’ takes us into his thoughts about blame and accident, the death of the little girl picking flowers, which haunts him as later he picks up parts of bone from corpses in the Franco Prussian war. The poem linking him with master and windmill, ‘The Monster, the Master and the Windmill’ returns to another night of fire and banishment, which in effect enables his escape, since he is ‘as always, presumed dead’. In retirement he paints blue nudes, having contemplated the complexity of poetry – Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge. The whole poem sequence, The Monstrance, is a ‘midrash’, and a triumph. It fills in gaps in tales we know, and extends them, so it is equally innovative in its effective, creative play with a vast variety of poetic forms, and in its challenges to and speculations about life, belief, love, identity, journeying, mortality, change, metamorphosis of form, of life, of story. At the point at which ‘The Monster’s Last Lesson’ takes place, the verse turns to ‘This is the house that Jack built’. He’s a ‘raggedy man, a man man-made’, but death frees him in the build-up of this poem, which releases him till his last word seems to be ‘Gypsy’. But it cannot end this way. Of course, he does not die, he has been made from resurrected parts, so the poem ends in laughter, in fact, in new life. ‘Hubris’ though this re-creation might be, it leaves ‘them both in stitches’. Like all good Monsters created from our own faults and fears, this one, as we know, never lies down and dies, so the last poem fittingly, is ‘The Monster Returns’.
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maintained by Michelle Bernard - Contact michelle.bernard2@ntlworld.com
- last updated March 21, 2013 |
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