Poetry- like every art- is a driven thing… often best when it bites and is driven by the thoughts that keep us up at night. Love, whimsy, wonderment- yes, but also pain, bitterness, and the brutal honesty of providing a witness to what you have seen as it disappears down the darkening tunnel of memory. Jeff Rath’s new book, ‘Film Noir’ captures this cinematic experience. Dark, gritty, probing, and grimly loving, it’s a visual record of the poet’s memories being unfurled before us like an old black and white film.
The book is divided into three sections. Within Rath is standing at the intersection between his father and himself, struggling to understand the road his father- and now he- must travel. Seeing himself in his memories of his father, and remembering his father in the place he is now, he writes, “I was lost on the baffling continent/of words and rhythm and sound/until I read your poems- grounded in some temporary architecture/of some triggering town/bordered by a stream- and I believed at lat I had found a map.” Much of the book is Rath coming to terms with the loss of his father, whose presence echoes throughout the book, and his relationship to him- from the eyes of a child to the man his is today.
Rath paints a landscape throughout his book- sharp and cynical, of dying industrial towns, cold-hearted killers, and the burnt-out streets and broken alleys in which many of us spend our lives, running from our own fates- often from our deeds. ”This is the backdrop” he writes, “against which all your nightmares are projected:/ a spiderweb labyrinth/deadend streets/the thousand dreamless rooms/ flightless wings of peeling paint/ fist-shaped holes in walls/ where stillborn hope was laid to rest. // It is the solitary bulb/ dangling like a hanged man/in the center of every room:”
Interwoven between, Rath explores relationships, their actions and their fractures- and consider the paths that bring us to our current moment and the roles we play all the while. And in a way, roles is what this book is about: the roles we play as children, as parents, as lovers, and finally- of ourselves, our own observers, trying to sift through the reality of our lives and make sense of it all without slipping into the temptation of cleaning it up and becoming our own victim. Rath magnificently avoids that role. Instead he does not flinch in staring himself down, eventually bringing us out beyond the characters he gives us into the place where we are ultimately the spectator. “Everything is a movie to me now, / reduced to light and shadow:/ you and I merely images/ flickering in that one brief scene…”
Jeff Rath’s will be reading for the Cartel on Thursday, January 26th between 7:15 and 9:00 pm. His new book is available through Iris G Press at http://irisgpress.org/
