Courtesy of Betterworldbooks.com
A student of MIT once remarked that attending that particular institution as an undergraduate was much like taking a drink of water from a firehose. The same could be said about reading Iain Haley Pollock’s collection of blistering poems, selected by Elizabeth Alexander as winner of the Cave Caanem Award, and graced with the outlandish title of Spit Back a Boy. Pollock’s main concern with his poems seems to be the sharp, undeniable close-knittedness of family and race, and the demanding, life-long connotations those two ideas carry with them.
Pollock’s poems are some of the most personal poems I have read in a long time. He doesn’t seem to feel the need to hold back anything, and indeed he lets all his dirty laundry hang high in the breeze: from longing to “scrape, as if fish scales, / the rosy skin from [his] forearms” as a young boy so that he might be more black like his mother (a friend tells him “We all black inside), to watching his wife Naomi stalk away from him in a huff as he tries to “remember most days we are like [lovers], playful / and loving in public,” to “Great Great Aunt Aida / [who] trained her lapdog / to attack dark-skinned men;” the majority of the vignettes comprising the collection are full of distress and bitter distemper. There are, of course the occasional moments of lightness, which as well feature a younger, less cynical Pollock. In one poem entitled “Affection,” Pollock recounts the night of a school dance, and an endearing moment between Pollock and his father, who steadily clips away “four week’s worth / of hair.” However, those moments are few and far between.
The collection’s greatest fault is its seemingly haphazard construction, which in turn makes the poetic narrative seem flagrantly collage-like. The poems themselves work very effectively – when independent from one another. They are poems that very definitively speak for themselves. They are poems your eyes would bashfully glide over to were they to appear in the latest edition of the New Yorker, perhaps drawn in by the crispness of Pollock’s staccato, six-syllable name, perhaps by the titles (some of which could stand on their own as works of artistic curiosity, i.e. “upon irremediable shores, those who never had time” and “Kiladelphia”); regardless, Pollock’s poems are bound to spark interest. Yet, when shuffled together like cards in a tarot deck, the package gets bogged down in its own filth. After countless tales of gunfire, suicide and every other possible manifestation of human suffering, all the misery bleeds together. Spit Back a Boy is a collage, no doubt, but a collage left out in a rainstorm by accident. What once was a beautifully constructed, perceptive, eloquent voice became something malevolent, acid-tongued, acerbic.
Perhaps that was precisely the effect Iain Haley Pollock was going for. Life for many boys and girls is a never-ending barrage of streets running red with the blood of innocents, of misguided summer afternoons and fights over how to cope with the loss of a loved one. And, yes, Pollock seems to go through a sort of transformation by the collection’s end. The closing poem (in my opinion one of the strongest in the collection) starts out bitter and distant, yet miraculously Pollock becomes grounded by the very skin he so longed to shed. After growing up in a world of black and white, with Pollock caught in his own private purgatory of mixed-race chaos, he comes to understand that people are not as short-sighted as they used to be. People, in the end, are not as self-absorbed and clueless as they seem. In the final poem, Pollock at first foolishly takes a demonstration of familial kinsmanship from his wife’s cousin as involuntarily derogatory (“I back away, / onto a gravel path, bristling to think that them / is the three [Hispanic] grave diggers, that them is us, dark people,”). He soon comes to the realization that the exclusivity of “them” meant to include Pollock. Finally, it seems, Pollock can relax. He starts musing on his own death, and how his children might memorialize their own father. Hopefully Pollock writes more, so that his memory will not be one of a bitter old man.
7 Golden Eggs
