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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > ISSUE THIRTY-SIX: Oct-Dec (06) > Reviews >Richard Jeffery Newman's The Silence of Men...reviewed by Amy Unsworth

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The Silence of Men
Richard Jeffery Newman
CavanKerry Press
ISBN Number: 0972304584

Reviewer: Amy Unsworth



Richard Jeffery Newman´s debut book The Silence of Men explores the impact of history and one´s past on present day life. The young man whose voice is primarily heard throughout the book speaks on a variety of complications from his background: sexual abuse at the hands of an older man, homosexual encounters, a failed love affair abroad, persecution for his Jewish heritage during his youth, and the problematical relationship he has with his own ethnic tradition. The poems act to give voice; through them, the speaker finds a way to break the silence surrounding his past.

With such a list of poetic themes, it would be easy to classify this work as confessional. The subject matter is often intensely personal, providing the reader with glimpses of the speaker´s most intimate moments. The poem “Working the Dotted Line," for instance, documents a woman´s first sexual experience. Although the details are at times graphic, the tenderness of the lovers and their inability or failure to break the silence that lies between them after the act is completed is the main focus of the poem. “My wordlessness was shame./ I´d no idea how not to hurt her," the speaker tells us. The poetry acts as a supplement to what has happened; it reenacts the past and works to articulate significant emotions which until now had remained unuttered.

However, to simply classify the poems as confessional would be to ignore another important dimension of Newman´s work. The collection includes pieces that echo survivors´ stories of Nazi atrocities and poems that serve as witness to other acts of violence perpetrated by men in the present time. In “Isaac´s Story," the poet recounts the birth of a child and his circumcision in a concentration camp. In “Rachel´s Story," a woman must face her children´s bodies and the inhumanity of the guard who laughs at her distress:

...I didn´t grieve
til the bodies that had been my daughter and son
passed before me. I let them pass and when
The guard walked by asked him to shoot me. His laugh
is with me still....

These stories function thematically to frame the poems that follow and further the theme of silence. In this framework, to be silent is also an act of complicity. As Yusef Komunyakaa suggests in the forward, the poems indicate that “we are responsible for what we know, for what we´ve witnessed." The poems suggest that people are ethically required to bear witness and, because of this insistence, the book transcends the classification of confessionalism.

While the Holocaust stories work to further these notions of the importance of witness, the first-hand accounts of domestic violence and abuse work more convincingly. The poems related to the Holocaust, delivered in voices other than the primary speaker´s, are less effective, I feel, because the imagery used in these accounts, such as gold fillings and tattoos, tends to repeat the imagery of many other Holocaust accounts. Much more compelling are poems such as “Commerce," which situates the speaker on a modern-day street when an encounter with a prostitute triggers a flashback to his childhood abuse:

a man who´s given what she thinks she´s worth
standing while she unzips his pants, and my mouth

tastes what she tastes, and I´m twelve...

. . .

and I do not know how not to take it.

Even with poems that recount such dark subject matter, the aim of the poet is not simply to rehash what has happened or place blame, but through the poetry break the silence and shame surrounding such incidents, that the speaker may “let go of what is useless" (“After the Funeral"). If many of the poems are about the past, they also work to fill silences, the omissions that prevented grieving and healing from occurring. What remains of the past, what the speakers carry with them, must be spoken in order to let go of the emotional turmoil. “Dear Ji-in" and “Dear Yoon," poems dedicated to the lover and her daughter left behind in Korea, illustrate this perfectly:

...You grabbed my hand,
led me to the edge and we stood gazing out
over the water, a future
waiting for us to cross it.
Yoon...
These lines must end. I have to let you go.

There are many such poems about letting go, at last, of the past that haunts the speaker. Ultimately a new start, a future without shame, is possible for him, which he states succinctly in “Catching my Breath":

My body has learned many lies
but here, in this bed we share,
they fall from me till I am clean
a tree in winter
awaiting the new season.

But just as “what" a poet says is important, “how" should also not be ignored. At first glance one might be tempted to regard these poems as free verse, but a close inspection shows a poet very comfortable with traditional forms and variations of these forms. Poems such as “Catching My Breath" stylistically evoke forms such as Haiku and Tanka, while others utilize sonnet or near-sonnet forms with varying intensities of rhyme schemes, from masculine rhyme to near or slant rhyme. “Surrender" is a quite adroit handling of the villanelle form. The poet´s attention to form helps control the often volatile subject matter and demonstrates his dedication to the craft of poetry.

In many ways, The Silence of Men can be read as a narrative. The reader follows the speaker´s journey through a complicated past and understands both how these events have shaped him and how he refuses to let these events control his adult decisions. In this debut book, the voice the reader hears is a strong one, singing, despite the hurts and wrongs of the past, an optimistic song in which “the earth [can be] transformed to a tent where we all break bread" (“Poem from the Barnes & Noble Café"). If the ending of silence is also the beginning of new stories, I look forward to reading future books from Newman, to hearing what he´ll sing about next.
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