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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > ISSUE FORTY-TWO: Oct-Dec (07) > Reviews >John Pursley III's When, by the Titanic...reviewed by James Owens



When, by the Titanic
John Pursley III
The Portlandia Group
ISBN Number: 0-9672881-6-9

Reviewer: James Owens



It has been said that all poems are elegies for the moment of their making, a formula that throws into relief a famous tension between the vanishing, never-to-be-retrieved slice of existence that is the moving now and the relative sturdiness of a made thing preserving the effort of will and intellect. Creators respond to this tension. The Mesopotamian king Gilgamesh, having quested after immortality, can find no better comfort among men or gods than to survey the beautiful wall he has erected around his city. The developers of elegant and popular software, no doubt, eye the arrival of new generations with a disquiet that is not merely economic, but also aesthetic. How long will it be before their virtual cities fall to rubble and dust?

John Pursley III is a poet who thinks about transience. His poems are successful because he understands the absolute dependence between the dying moment´s relationship to the lifetime and the dying moment´s relationship to the form of the poem. One of the best moments in When, by the Titanic comes when three poems about water and death speak to each other.

"After the Flood–" is a prose poem:

My father took pictures of washed-out fences, each field left fallow, the pine trees uprooted, their black roots a rot of contorted tangles, blazoned–just slightly–with whatever light jack-wedged its way beneath the gnarled brushwood of sycamore & spruce, the firs & whatnot. While birds rebuilt, we busied ourselves with dying–destruction´s formidable effects: the water bent back against itself, burbling up over the dam in green curtains of spray, rising through the lock like a blown gasket, or a kitchen imbued with smoke.

A reader senses Pursley´s attention to the music of language and word choices that extend the linguistic space of the poem, taking in both child and father subjects and the presumably older voice of the speaker looking back: "black roots a rot of contorted tangles," matter-of-fact "jack-wedged" played off against delicate and recherché "imbued." The poem ends on a startling image of implied danger that echoes back through the description of the flood´s effects. Among things seen floating in the water is "that small dog, washed around the trunk of a tree, stripped of all flesh, as if by scavenger birds–how beautifully the bones held the shape of his body, like the hull of a ship–the sun, bleached white."

On the facing page, and in dialogue with "After the Flood–," "A Funeral Party" is a sonnet:

By folding the paper into the small hull of a boat–
Creasing each corner just right, as if he were stropping
A straight-edged razor–it wasn´t as if he´d hoped
To find anything easier, or that to bring
A father back, such ritual alone would suffice
Among the cheap pine perfumes of the candelabras,
The faces of friends burbling, strange as mayflies,
Over his mother, in their masks, macabre.

No one noticed his leaving, or how, when he
Ran from the house, he stumbled before the lake,
Or how–to right the boat–he set pennies
In the helm. Then, pushing it away–
After the funeral parties came to pass
Along the road–how it kept coming back.

It can be no accident that the stripped bones of "After the Flood–," shaped like the hull of a ship, lead directly into a boy mourning a father by folding paper (maybe the funeral announcement that happened to be in his hand when he fled?) into "the small hull of a boat" that could, but doesn´t, symbolically carry away the pain of the death and the boy´s isolation in these strange new circumstances.

"A Funeral Party" is consciously a poem. The idea of a boat to carry the dead, or the souls of the dead, has a long pedigree, stretching back at least to Beowulf and the Greek myths of Charon, ferryman of the underworld, who will receive in payment those pennies placed in the paper boat as ballast. It is also no accident that this sonnet stresses its juxtaposition with a prose poem, setting out the formal limits of the chapbook. Just as the boy in the poem accedes half-consciously to the impulse to put his grief into making something, so the grown poet creases the lines of the poem in order to make a vessel freighting whatever can be salvaged from the past´s slippage.

The only other sonnet in When, by the Titanic, "Shipbuilding," emphasizes through form the line it draws directly back to "After the Flood–" and "A Funeral Party," amplifying and confirming the concerns of those earlier poems.

Softened, the ribs of my grandfather´s boat
Bent easily into shape. Like some strange beast
Each cusp came together, baring the bones
In the raised ridge of the back.

The grandfather here is already in the process of dying from some unnamed cause, but he takes care to pass on to his grandson the sort of devotion to honest craftsmanship it takes to build a seaworthy vessel. By this point in this carefully built chapbook we are ready to understand a parallel with the craft of the poet and the things a poem can carry through or away from the flood.

When, by the Titanic won the Portlandia Poetry Chapbook Contest for 2006 and is John Pursley´s first book, though readers will have to suffer through little of the fumbling and throat-clearing that plague many first books. Pursley is writing poems as achieved and indelible as anyone in the country, and one can only hope that When, by the Titanic is the first book of many to come.
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