~WILLIAM DORESKI~
JEFF FRIEDMAN:
TAKING
DOWN THE ANGEL
Friedman’s poems commonly
use a jazzy,
two- or three-beat line
that propels the narrative
through
a syntax complex enough to produce
vivid enjambments and lengthy
sentences
unfolding down the page.
The resultant brief
narratives have
the vividness and dynamics
of lyric and the
self-propulsion
of good fiction . . . .
In his third collection, Taking
Down the Angel, Jeff Friedman continues his exploration and
critique
of the autobiographical mode of lyric-narrative poetry.
Friedman's
poems commonly use a jazzy, two- or three-beat line that propels the
narrative
through a syntax complex enough to produce vivid enjambments and
lengthy
sentences unfolding down the page. The resultant brief narratives
have the vividness and dynamics of lyric and the self-propulsion of
good
fiction, satisfying Pound's injunction that "poetry be at least as well
written as prose."
Friedman's primary subject, continued from
his second book, Scattering the
Ashes, is a bildungsroman-like exploration of self-development
through
early schooling, work experience,
sexual awakening, and a gradual realization of the humanity of
parents.
Leavening this domestic matter are several wrenching poems on biblical
subjects that contextualize the apparently personal poems in a larger
world
of myth and Judaic heritage. By amplifying the strength of the
individual
poems and generating an archetypal resonance, these Old Testament poems
help give the collection greater weight than most contemporary poetry
collections.
The autobiographical poems, like most of
Friedman's
work, are characterized by dramatically depicted situations enlivened
with
careful attention to literal detail and figurative opportunities, as in
the opening of "Miss Strong and I":
When
Miss Strong
caught me
during our
forty-five
minute naptime
reading a
Superboy
comic
she took it
away from me and tore
it apart without
hesitation
the way a tall
skinny man
I had seen on
Ed Sullivan
ripped in half
a Southern Bell
White pages
with his hands
and then held
out both halves to the audience.
The poetry is in the details —
"Southern Bell,
/ White pages" — and in the humor of the association, but also, and
more
subtly, in the flex of the lines through the syntax, the relentless
enjambment
that underscores assonance (man
/ Sullivan / hands
/ halves) and dramatic
emphasis (naptime / comic
/ tore). "Miss
Strong
and I" is a small masterpiece of comic denouement, and illustrates
Friedman's
gift for depicting the rueful, regretful, slapstick, and shameful
moments
of life.
"Joseph," on the other hand, a free verse
poem, typifies the grimmer Old Testament ethos of tragedy and
psychological
devastation Friedman detects underlying ordinary modern lives.
I
felt the desert
enter me
through the
pupils of my eyes, my mouth,
the pores of
my skin.
I grew heavy
with sand
and heat.
I
thought they
might leave me to die
and the hyenas
would rip me
apart with their
powerful jaws
and the great
birds swirling
at the sun would
come down
to
feed on my
intestines
and liver.
The sufferings of Joseph are as
much psychological
as physical; eventually he would redeem himself through worldly
success,
but in this poem he remains suspended between rejection by his brothers
and triumph in Egypt. It is this state of uncertainly and
apparent
failure that interests Friedman, not Joseph's eventual victory.
Egypt,
even before Joseph gets there, is "salt-hard, bitter, seared / in
the fires of my dreaming." The cruelty of his brothers has
embittered
even his future success. Friedman knows that nothing can
compensate
for this disconnection between Joseph and his family, and this
awareness
lingers as we read Friedman's poems about his own family, his teachers,
co-workers, and childhood friends, all the people whose words,
attitudes,
acceptance or rejection of him would shadow his future.
This influx of Old Testament severity into
contemporary concerns becomes explicit in "In the Kingdom of My Palm,"
Friedman's grim elegy for his mother. Here the old and new worlds
mingle, and the tragic vision that propels so many of the ancient
stories
engenders an archetypal tonality of suffering and loss grounded in
expression,
in the word:
From
far away
my mother calls
out to me,
a thread of
voice
that floats
through air
words
breathed
in the darkness.
Near death
she sits in
a room
with
all her
things
and calls out
to me
with her hands
curled
like irises . .
.
The voice here is not the one of
poems like "Miss Strong and I," but of "Joseph," "The Bitterness of the
Prophet,"
and "Jacob," harrowing narratives that implicitly rebuke the Old
Testament
god for creating such an agonized world. As "Vigil," Friedman's
penultimate
poem, warns,
You
must go deeper
into sleep to
bury your fear
for soon we
must rise like breath
into the bright
brutal world
that never meant
to do us
any good.
Some years ago a critic referred to
the "often
grim task of reading a new book of poetry." No one reading Taking
Down the Angel will find it a grim task, despite its tragic
undertones.
Friedman's book is as readable as a novel, but funnier, craftier,
starker,
and more intelligent than all but the very best prose fiction.
With
a few of our other strong contemporaries, Friedman is reclaiming
narrative.
He is answering Robert Lowell's call for verse with "no conflict of
form
and content" and "that kind of human richness in rather simple
descriptive
language" associated with the greatest short stories and novels, but
adding
to it a mythical-religious resonance less concentrated genres can't
achieve.
Friedman, Jeff. Taking Down the Angel.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania:
Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0-8874838-4-4
$12.95
© by William Doreski
