Book Review

The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald
by John Guzlowski
Finishing Line Press, 2007, $12.00
www.finishinglinepress.com.

At his blog, John Guzlowski reports being awakened by his father's screams at night. With just a few sentences, he gives a chilling description of these occasions: "Screams, in my experience, are usually accompanied by an explosion of air. My father’s nightmare screams were drawn in. Even in his sleep, it was almost like he was afraid to scream." This is the objective correlative for his wretched and sublime chapbook The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald.

Guzlowski’s poems are a meditation on his father's experience as a laborer in a Nazi camp. The holocaust always strikes me as a questionable medium for artistic enquiry, because its weight as a singular actuality always overwhelms the product. It seems right to feel intimidated and wary when confronting it as a spectator. After all—whoa—this happened and who can fully harness it? And yet, its power rarely misfires; the holocaust, as source material, is at once too fertile to admire and too fertile to find disappointing.

This chapbook is no exception. Despite the handsomeness of the volume, a beige, staple-stitched pamphlet put out by Finishing Line Press, I was initially skeptical of the subject matter. No doubt this is partly due to the haunting cover drawing by Vojtek Luka, which signposts that I am about to confront the worst of human experience, and I'll have no choice but to be moved.

The 26 brief poems (including the Prologue and Epilogue) concern the father's days spent digging up bricks among heaps of murdered bodies while dreaming of his own death at night. Guzlowski recounts these borrowed memories in short, unadorned verses. The poems are numbered, but their arrangement doesn't follow a straight narrative line, which imbues the reading with a fragmentary, nightmarish sensibility of its own. This is effective enough to make me rescind any prejudicial skepticism I felt, and it also makes me realize that Luka's picture is the ideal cover art. Just as his war prisoners are eliding out of view, we encounter the father's experience through a palimpsest of Guzlowski's poetry.

I rescind my initial skepticism because it's not hard to find The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald to be genuinely moving. Guzlowski earns credit by not shying from a smear of comedy among the horror, as when the father remembers a movie featuring two men lost at sea. "...they look at each other in hunger and cry. // Then fatty smiles, and skinny cries harder." This Gary Larson-esque gag is made awful by the context, of course, but the poem’s expositional couplet makes it even harder to bear: "He remembers a movie he once saw/when he escaped from the camp."

Then there is the simile, "He is as hungry as a dog in winter," which isn't a joke at all except that it suggests the straight man's line ("How hungry is he?") that it just ran over. In fact, the simile starts running and doesn't stop:

He is as hungry as a dog in winter
in a forest filled with so much snow
that all the woodsmen and their wives
and children have fled to the village.

What happened to the dog? He got buried in the stampede of the next three lines—and what the image forgets completely is the real subject, the father. The metaphor has gone on without him, and he is back on his bed (actually, it's a shelf), thinking about sausage and his dead family until he falls asleep to a dream of drowning. All of this is in The Third Winter, and then: "He dreams a comedy—" It's about men loading up a cart and slipping in manure. "He laughs until someone kicks him." Colorless jokes seep furiously.

There is a textured humanity to these characters; the father wakes at night to think of the men sleeping around him—they're in the muck together, yet would steal the hunk of bread hidden at his groin. We're familiar with need as a motivation for theft—this world is shot through with hunger—but it indicates Guzlowski's mastery that the stealing isn't due solely to lack of food, but that the men are sad: "These thieves are like his brothers,/but at night loneliness and sorrow/will turn your brother against you."

Guzlowski says he wrote this book in order to understand his father’s screams. It's up to him to decide if the poems work on that level, but what he has done is provided a compelling and believable dimension for outsiders to contemplate another person's experience. That's the first and final goal of poetry. Read this book loud, like the Adagio for Strings, like night screams.—Adam Robinson