Brenda's Book Bash

Black Sabbatical, Brett Eugene Ralph (Sarabande Books, 2009)

The poems in Brett Eugene Ralph’s gritty, big hearted and aptly named collection straddle the worlds of bikers and Buddhists and present us with the usually forgotten faces and unexpressed inner lives of the working poor. This author’s search for grace in this hardscrabble late 20th century landscape is detailed in poems which refuse to offer up traditional resolutions, instead giving us a range of experiential observations of brutal stories of child abuse, neglect, accidents, drug-fueled desperation, and just plain old bad luck that purposely refuse to answer our age old question of “why me?”

Many of the poems in Black Sabbatical bubble with anger and acts of impotent rage, yet there is also a sense of using the poetry to empty out into the world all those things that might stand in the way of achieving the control and the inner peace the poet expresses a longing for. In the first poem in the collection, “Firm Against the Pattern” the speaker describes a party.

All night I had been hitting
on the daughter of a tiny woman
orphaned by Hiroshima.
Grandparents had been lost, and the mother
would soon be dead though no one knew
if it was the blast or the facility
she retired next to in Utah.

This was the kind of bitter irony
that made you want to burn the flag—
even if it was against the law, even
on the Fourth of July on property owned
by a Republican state senator.
Which is precisely what would happen
later, after we’d drunk the wine.

But before this will happen he watches a woman named Charity dancing in her kitchen, holding a knife and a ripe mango, he rests his head against a screen door.

Closing my eyes, I extended my tongue
and pressed it firm against the pattern:
I tasted yesterday’s rain,
the carcasses of moths,
broken glances, tears,
the smoke of not-so-distant fires—
all those desperate gestures
we collect and call the seasons.

This surprising and stunning image of tasting the screen door, which means tasting all the pain and suffering represented by this group of outsiders, says much about what is to come in the poems that follow, Ralph's in-your-face demonstrations of his characters’ search for moments of grace amid the tragic events he chronicles.

“This Poem Has a Hole in the Middle,” a phrase that encapsulates many aspects of Ralph’s poetics, is a case in point. The speaker teases around the edges of an inexpressible act of violence.

There are no metaphors
for what was done to her.
The seven boys who pushed her off
her bike, her school books splayed
like poisoned pigeons on the pavement—

those boys are not symbolic.
They are real,
and this poem has a hole in the middle,
a hollow tree stuffed with Hustlers,
deep in the woods beyond the subdivision;

Our gaze is focused on the images of the bicycle, the books, the porno magazines, and the dreaded, deadening “subdivision” whose woods hold the dirty little secrets the speaker insists we acknowledge yet refuses to describe. Ralph backs off from the event here, as he does in many other of the poems, changes the scene in the next stanza to a sofa in a family room and again lets us use our imagination in figuring out what happens when the TV goes black and the babysitter gets bored:

a sofa sagging
in the family room,bathed
in late-night TV’s purple light—
when it went black
before your parents came back

and the babysitter got bored
Television didn’t cost anything
yet, and your options could be counted on
the fingers of one hand.
And even if you didn’t want to

because you didn’t understand,
even if you hated it more than anything
in the world, whatever they showed,
you had to sit through
because you were just a child.

We aren’t even sure who is speaking here, or for whom. The oblique ending and the refusal to make explicit the relationship between the two events expresses the helplessness the child feels, and the sense of self-loathing that can’t be directly acknowledged or explained. By changing the focus back to the television screen, Ralph draws us back to the periphery, to save us from all the implications contained in that hole in the middle of the poem while still insisting that we at least imagine what we will see if we look closely.

This, finally, is how the poet survives, by his heightened awareness of the inequities, the pain, and by his recognition of the small moments of grace waiting for us in the unlikeliest of places.