Nightwood Editions, 2008
read by Darren Bifford
Living Things is Matt Rader’s second book of poetry. The good poems in this book are very good—with the lesser poems standing as just good. They are technically accomplished and gritty, displaying something of a debt to Babstock and early Lowell. More than this, Rader’s book is the result of a great deal of intense reading in mid-20th century English and American poetry. I suppose this kind of background should be assumed with any contemporary poetry; with Rader, however, the indebtedness of influence and effort to write poems that can compete with the best is especially evident and painfully admirable.
There are several poems — e.g., “You, Louis MacNeice” and On First Looking into Larkin’s “Aubade”” — that make explicit the exemplary models against which Rader has set his craft. The form of the poems mirror — or, better, plays against — the formal modes of MacNeice and Larkin respectively. E.g.,
“I get up each day in the dark and in the dark go / To sleep half drunk”
More impressive to my ear is Rader’s free translation of Rimbaud’s The Drunken Boat. This poem is fantastic. One has only to compare it to the original or more recent translations (i.e, Stephen Heighton’s) to see how much this poem is Rader’s own. Here’s the first stanza:
“Comes the wayward waters of the coast
Bearing me on its unbroken back, chartless,
Without compass or sextant, no ghost
Or unseen hand guiding me by cutlass[…]”
And so the poem builds—regular quatrains with an ABAB rhyme scheme. But the rhythms are what really make it for me: less Romantic than they are Anglo-Saxon, sounding like a contemporary enactment of The Seafarer.
Rader is not, however, pursuing the emulation of the dead. The best poems here are invested with a disciplined and highly focused interest in formal innovation. My favorite poem is the opening poem, one that offers the best example of Rader’s originality. “The Great Leap Forward” is composed of seven stanzas of unequal length: 1-1-2-3-5-8-13. . This sequence isn’t arbitrary: it’s structured in terms of the Fibonacci sequence, according to which the value of each consecutive unit is the sum of the two preceding units. Some research will show that the sequence was discovered in Ancient Indian and apparently played an important role in Indian ritual — signifying “purity of utterance”. I suspect Rader is aware of this history; as such the poem announces both formally and thematically the larger ambition of the collection as a whole. The poem enviably unites intellectual rigor with linguistic density and is a pleasure to read.
When the poems are less successful, they’re still respectably good — that is, formally accomplished but with less emotional urgency. I’d put the two sonnet sequences scattered throughout the text in this category. They deal, respectively, with the imagined lives of North American trees and plants. Take, for instance, the first few lines of “Garry Oak”: “Warped, twisted, bent out of shape, cured I con- / form to no straight plane. Good for nothing. / Knock-kneed, knobby, in need of a cane, / I’m age encased in scaly skin[…]”. Evident linguistic dexterity is at work here but the final effect to my ear is that of a riddle.
Rader is best when shooting from his chest. I’m looking forward to—and somewhat terrified to receive—his next book.
