Book Review

Hard Blessings
by Patrick Carrington
Main Street Rag Publishing Company.
(www.mainstreetrag.com;
ISBN 13:978-1-59948-115-9; 42 pages, $10

I wanted to love this book. The cover—a child staring out the back of a car window, all gray and grainy, was intriguing and melancholy and a little sinister. That, coupled with the title, Hard Blessings, promised lots of pain and bitterness—perfect fodder for poetry!

Don't get me wrong; there are many really wonderful poems in here, and I'm going to save them for last. But a caveat first. There are a few poems that just missed being great because of a metaphor problem. Case in point: in "A New Kind of Blue," where the love the speaker feels is destroying him, where the love is

...A slave's song—
hardship as thick as the blue smoke
of a backwater honkeytonk, almight
as the crooked blue notes that rattle
church rafters in Mississippi. Like that, a wild
pouring the whole self outward,

(awesome—great language and drive and music, but here's where it takes the wrong turn):

free of our common gags.
And what is more chaotic than love?
The one I've been allowed lies
like a lifeless baby
I cry to in the crook of my arm

(oh dear, but he manages to recover from the misstep):

until I'm as full of myself as a drunk
who makes the earth pivot
around him, dizzy enough
to swear he'll never drink again,
to close his eyes and whisper uncle.

(into a sad, very capable ending, that has lost some of its power because of the baby interruption.)

Part of the problem for this reader was that there didn't seem to be any sort of throughline to the book, or at least the feel of one despite the variety of subjects in the poems. The more interesting ones, and the ones where the poet just flowed, at one with the words and the story, came in the middle of the book and focused on that feeling of loss, of suffering, whether it be love or something else. Here, most often, it's love. There is the thread of a journey, of a man crossing dangerous inner territory of deep torment, stopping to wail and wallow where appropriate, which the poet should have stuck to. The detours he takes are dead ends. A few are vibrant enough to stick, like the poem "Crazy Mabel":

It was the way she dressed, halfway
between available and abandoned,
lipstick outside the lines, hair coiffed
by a lamp socket....

Here Carrington allows Mabel to leap off the page, but by the end she is dissolved into abstracts:

....she taught me how
to be fine with myself in the moment,
how to color and shape my coming bloom,
how to recognize the hard blessings
that don't fully connect to the description that came before and aren't necessary.

There's also the poem about the grandmother lying in the casket and the child pushed forward to look when he doesn't want to:

....I wanted her
hand, untwined from mother of pearl
and in mine, teaching me to cross
this last new street. I needed her
again to brace my bones, to carry
my tears in the bucket of her arms.

Now that's good stuff. There's that moment of transformation I was looking for.

Similarly, the turn in that direction starts with "Lullaby of Atlantic City," where a man continually loses himself in "one more Keno girl with spinning cherries/in her eyes." The poem take too long to get started, but ends on a bitter and disillusioned dig at romance, a surprising and perfect note, because we can hear how the speaker still longs for it:

....Forget
that the first thing you did this morning
was drop cash in a drawer
with a bible in it, and especially forget
those two young lovers there with a knife,
casually leaving their hearts
on a tree trunk. As if they have spares
tucked away. As if they'll never be scarce.

It's borderline murderous—as if the two lovers are literally carving out one another's hearts and slapping them on the tree instead of just carving shapes in the wood, evoking a dark, obsessive love that consumes its object. Even so, if the narrator could carve his out and give it again, we know he would.

The two jewels in this book are "Flux" and "At Our Tables." I needn’t explain either subject to you, as both come through clearly and cleanly. "Flux" is simply and effectively written:

When I realized I had not through of you
for twenty-four hours, I felt indecent,
as if I had sworn into God's clean ear.

As is "At Our Tables":

....for all the nailed
whose board of pain is so long
they must rise from the table
and search for the end of it—I stay
and say grace.

Ah, poetry—there it is. There are others like these—the aforementioned "Tumbleweeds," which has an absolutely killer beginning that reassures you that the poet knows his way around a simile:

I skitter across the heat of lonely towns
like a drop on a skillet, stopping only
to smooth myself out in bars

and the last two poems, "This Night Too is Round" and "Nowhere," which end the book on its strengths: suffering and journeying. The poet himself seems to know this, as he writes in "Why I Tell My Son About Trains":

I've moved through all my lives,
as if they were rails I ride,
the one where I was simple, the one
where men don't cry, the one
where I came to know the sheer sweep
of night, and I go to the next and next
quite full of days and ever shy of answers.

There's that fantastic rhythm and sense of the line and assonance—the silent power of a skilled poet. Take a moment and read that aloud. Wonderful. I couldn't help thinking this should have been the first poem. Perhaps if it had, the connections between the journey, loss, suffering, love, and boyhood would have been fully made, each poem finding stronger footing and a home. But, in all Hard Blessings is a competent and almost-perfect collection, with a few notches of character.—Lady Lit Maven