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Film History
Al Maginnes
WordTech Editions
ISBN Number: 1932339930
Reviewer: Terri Brown-Davidson
The most beautiful moments (and there are many) of Film History illuminate the sometimes gripping and almost always dramatic vision of reality that separates the seen from the unseen, in art and in imagination, in daily life and the perspective that derives from speculation about our fellow human beings. Film History is a poetry collection that’s rife with the intersections between dailiness and mortality, but it’s not in the least a depressing book. The luxurious sense of craft and carefulness, of meticulousness, that illuminates these gorgeous poems makes Film History a brilliant addition to Maginnes’s already brilliant body of work. If you are, as I am, already a fan of Maginnes’s brand of hard-wrought and voluptuously surfaced poetry, you must buy this collection. Maginess can take the darkest moments of daily life, those overlaid with a shadow of mortality that elongates and darkens even while we observe it, and turn them into absolutely spectacular fuel for his brand of personal-impersonal poems.
Maginnes is an "impersonal poet" in the sense that Eliot’s technical dicta might have incorporated this phrase. I review a lot of poetry books and am frankly used to seeing the tossed-off poem, the casually wrought poem, the lightly conversational poem, the frankly journalistic poem, make a bid for center stage. But there’s nothing careless, unmediated, or "unprocessed" about Maginnes’s work. This isn’t to say that he isn’t a spontaneous poet, dedicated to casting a spotlight on those small moments of dailiness that, for most of us, can flame suddenly and shine both now and later with an extraordinary luster. Maginnes’s poetic territory is as much the ordinary as the extraordinary, is as much devoted to the grimy boy in the restaurant as it is to the literal caged lion in the backyard. It’s that Maginnes treats both the ridiculous and the sublime with an unerring attention to detail, an unflagging attention to craft, that makes me take, honestly, as much joy in the burnished surfaces of his poems as I take in their illuminating flashes brought to bear on a disparate subject matter.
And Maginnes is not only a musical poet, he’s a poet addicted to music: witness the wonderful sampling of poems in this collection about Chet Baker, Thelonius Monk, Kenny Burrell.
Whether Maginess is rhapsodizing about music/musicians or inching us closer to rapture with his own lush brand of sonicism, his poems are a complicated joy that the reader has to savor to believe.
Frankly, I’m putting in my bid for Film History as one of the best poetry collections of 2005.
There are too many simply fascinating and terrific poems in this book, spanning a sensuously rampant range of subject matter, for me to be forced to isolate a few (ALL of the poems are strong, and I can’t remember the last collection I read where I believed that was the case). Am I suggesting that the National Book Award Foundation got it wrong this year? In nonfiction, no (the winner was Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking). In poetry, yes, absolutely. It’s really time that we stopped focusing on the prestige of the publisher behind these collections and started looking at the strength of the work itself. Al Maginnes wasn’t even nominated for an NBA, and—in my opinion—that was a mistake.
If you don’t believe me, witness the sheer magic of just one of the poems from this marvelous collection, quoted in its entirety. If you’re not seduced by Maginnes’s music, as they say, it’s quite possible that you, Dear Reader, are scarcely breathing.
The Lion in the Backyard
When dusk gentles sky to charcoal-gray, when the quiet streetlights,
the tawny window-lights wink on, only orbiting moths
and the house cats that quietly prowl night’s depths still hear
the harping of wild blood. But let the sky fall
to just the right shade, and I can hear again
The throaty call rising over roof-crests, over
the churning of crickets and traffic hum
to tear a hole in the fragile curtain of our domesticity.
No one could say what human impulse
delivered a lion to live out its days in a pen
In a North Carolina backyard, flanked by backyard grills and swing
sets,
matted with dust, ignored by all but the curious and the frightened.
The Wing brothers lived two blocks away, their front yard
our summer night gathering place since
their mother would not complain, no matter how late or loud
we played the music or how often we walked
behind the house to get high. One night
a minister, breath stained with non-sacramental wine,
tried to recruit us to paint his church,
attempting to tame us with labor and shame, just as the lion’s owner
might have dreamed of that beast dozing at his feet
while he watched television or read scripture.
None of us laid a stroke of paint to a single holy board.
In the long exhale of that summer’s end, I led a girl
who refused to believe the lion’s presence up to see for herself.
Its tail switched as we approached, its chesty growl
bloody promise that it hungered to escape,
to stalk the savannas of our suburbs, the shorn grass
of lawns poor camouflage for its lurking
in the subtractions of light between houses, its prey
not careless zebras or gazelles but mailmen, meter readers,
the weak, clumsy walkers hidden behind flimsy doors.
We watched the malevolent yellow eyes watching us,
the air we breathed, the dirt we stood on, transformed
by that regard. The quickening of her breath,
her nipples, small roses of flesh, dimpling the thin fabric
of her shirt, testified to how the body fevers
when mortality is teased by a greater appetite.
In the eyeblink of our turning away, metal chimed
as the lion hit the chain link barricade, pushing
Into the thin wire holding him from the free-roaming world,
shaking the plywood ceiling of the pen, boards
that might have built his only view of heaven.
Alarm thinned our blood; I steered her away,
not down the trail of streetlights to the Wings’ house
but up a nearly hidden path that neighbored a brown pond.
We curved together while full dark covered us
like a drop cloth. And through the rattle of high grass,
the tearing of our own open-mouthed breath,
the long vowels of the lion’s voice magnified our shaking.
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