the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless

by Matthew Cooperman 

(Free Verse Editions, 2024) 

Reviewed by Michael McLane

 

In the notes for the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless, Matthew Cooperman describes his newest collection as a “curiously durational project,” a twenty-year work built on odes that explore the vulnerabilities and complicities of being American in the twenty-first century. These odes act as the collection’s tender, beating heart as well as its sedimentary and interrogative core. Questions are key to the idiolect of the poems. Their exploration of the roles of difference, activism and love in modern American life offer an accretion and momentum that sustain the durational scope of the work and, at times, offer possibility, perhaps even hope, as a counterpoint to the memorial nature of odes. 

The scope of Cooperman’s work manifests early in the book. “Snow Globe” introduces us to the poet as a child living in a politically active home in the midst of another profoundly dangerous time for the nation:

    It was January 6, I was six years old, which would’ve made it
                  the 60s, and it was snowing
    Snow filling trash cans like ashtrays. Ma and Pa
            distantly fighting the giant snowstorm.

This is one of the oldest poems in the collection, written in 2003 or 2004 in response to the hubris of the Bush administration. Cooperman admits the choice of January 6th was made at the time primarily for a kind of numerological alliteration, but the prescience of this choice is unnerving and haunts the rest of the collection as the far more insidious actions of the Trump administrations come to bear on the poems. This snow globe of childhood is predictive of coming storms that are multilayered and multivalent—from the tumult of the 1960s, in which both of Cooperman’s parents were politically active, to literal weather of climate change to the inundation of whiteness that lead to the insurrection of January 6, 2021. This progression is confirmed in the subsequent poem, “No Ode,” where:

    On a Wednesday at the Capitol something did happen, not the dream
    again deferred, not the righteous bear not the know nothing snake
             just the sickening spell of blood…

The poem weaves in and out of these two periods of monumental shifts in the body politic and violence on both institutional and individual levels. William F. Buckley and Allen Ginsberg are interwoven with 9/11, calving glaciers, and school shootings. The poem asserts and negates, asserts and negates, undercuts itself like a clumsy nation that doesn’t quite earn its ode. So, it is a “No Ode,” a longing to come to terms with atrocity only to find its accretion and recurrence, ending in the acknowledgment: 

    This is a history poem       This is not true       In my country there is
                no history but the lesson we didn’t learn

Cooperman collects, scours, and recontextualizes these lessons, salvaging bits of wisdom from the eternal return of American hubris and violence. The poems are often iterations of a nation in conversation with one another or talking past one another. Two of the most poignant examples occur in “General Context” and “Major Lure,” poems that apply cut-up and erasure techniques to speeches given by General Douglas MacArthur, including his “Farewell Address to Congress,” in the years immediately following World War II. In “General Context,” he writes:

    Americans never quit, 24/7 openness, we will be prepared to say
    something, do things…

    Our government has kept us within borders, as do governments
    do by law. Part of the American Dream is in the borders, where they
    hover. The best of luck is to be born into some kind of dream. 

This disconnect between sleeplessness and dreaming, paranoia and vigilance continues in “Major Lure,” where:
    
    One cannot wage war with old soldiers. Under no circumstances
    should their sleeping be disturbed. Our country is now fit
    for an ailing king. There is no substitute for the facts…

Sandwiched between these two remixed warnings from a departing general is the poem “Gun Ode,” which operates with the breakneck speed of its titular character and offers us an ode at its most heartbreaking. What is abundantly clear but goes unsaid is that this is, again, no ode (“No Ode”) in the conventional sense, but an examination of the catalyst for tragedy, a poem to the facilitator of odes rather than their recipients. It opens with a reference to Kent State, “a dollar with a gun in its mouth, a daisy with the sun / in its mouth,” as well as a callout to Pete Seeger in the lines “where have all the flowers gone // Gun—what have you done to our bodies?” The rate at which this machine births fascists is exponential in the modern era, as Cooperman understands all too well:

                        My hands don’t fit the bitter hasp
    
    As in naked and afraid, without means of protection, we were
    forced to love and evolve

    As in, O America, aren’t you tired of being an ode, why don’t you 
    ever use your Kevlar® shield?

            O First Responder, thank you also for being America

It is a poem that spares us no violence in its repetitions, its sonic qualities, its product placements and, most of all, in its complicity and sadness: 

    I can’t think of one happy memory ever associated with a gun

        Disarm      Disarm     Disarm      Disarm

    If the impulse to destruction is greater than the insight to love
             We are doomed to a garden of graves

    If freedom is money spent on guns, what is American grace?

Cooperman can envision a grace beyond fear and armament, and he does so again and again in this collection. Perhaps the most vivid example is in the alternative history he offers in “Country Mulligan,” where the hanging chads of the 2000 election fall differently and we have a President Gore and a “kinder enclosure […] / the planet turns cooler, greener, bluer […] / A Moslem spring flowers in poly-Arabian nights / Scheherazadism, Two Stateism, 23andMe goes viral.” All the dead poets and dancers and artists return; Sandy Hook is a place of community rather than mourning; the mass shooter at an Aurora theater finds love rather than profound loneliness. The poem is sad and hopeful, distraught and in love with possibility all at once. 

The hope that manifests in bits and pieces in “Country Mulligan” is more fully embodied in “Difference Essay,”  a ten-page poem that is simultaneously an ode to difference in all its forms—corporeal, cultural, political—and a study of being the parent of an autistic child, which shapes Cooperman’s understanding of the necessity of difference in American life. In a recent interview with the Laurel Review, Cooperman says of the poem, “atmosphere is a durational project, and that duration has also been the duration of my now eighteen-year-old autistic daughter. So the poem functions as a hinge of sorts. What happens to our country happens to us. And I didn’t really realize what was difference until I saw difference… the disease of homogeneity is actually—at least in my lifetime—an American disease.” Cooperman is unflinching in his indictment of this disease:

    But then I’d come to write of a terrible relentless
         sameness. The monochrome in the chromosome, the color
              of some and not others. Who is not other in the infinite
             catalogue of difference? To be riven is a state. “The shades
                  of the prison-house close round about us all”

And he is not alone. Voices and influences accrete as the book moves along, but perhaps nowhere more acutely than “Difference Essay.” In the passage above, he channels Walt Whitman, W.E.B. Du Bois, and philosopher Timothy Morton, whose concept of “hyperobjects” plays a recurring role in this and other books by Cooperman. In the same way that different versions of America talk to each other through these poems so, too, do different versions of the poet converse and illustrate how influences and mentors converge and diverge in these versions of ourselves. Whitman is a constant companion in these poems, as is Ed Dorn. The projective verse and proprioception of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson manifest in Cooperman’s use of the full “field” of the page as well as varying font sizes, colors, and other typographical techniques to score the poems. The result is a piece like “Difference Essay,”  a work so layered and polyphonic in its influences that it emulates the differences and possibilities the poet calls for in his nation as well.  

It is perhaps unsurprising then that, after the blizzard of violence, schism, and creeping homogeneity of the last twenty American years, Cooperman should offer up the final say of this collection to two poetic forefathers, Pete Seeger and Louis Zukofsky, in a poem called “Bouquet.” It ends on a couplet that ends on an ellipsis that echoes those past tragedies while planting literal and metaphorical hope in a new generation:

    the markings of progress
    by hook and drive

    anthem     anodyne     aloud

    the little hands
    the little hands stitch new flowers…
 

Sugar Suggests—Mini Reviews from Sugar House Review Staff

Believers and Seven Sermons from the Bacchae 

by John Tipton 

(Flood Editions, 2022)

This book intersperses new translations of the Gospel of Mark with the ancient Greek tragedy Euripides’ Bacchae and Tipton’s own poetry. Believers will change the way you think about ancient texts and broaden your perspective on time.

—Katherine Indermaur

Be With 

by Forrest Gander

(New Directions, 2018)

Forrest Gander dares to expose shortcomings and grief, revelations, and regrets after the death of his wife (poet C.D. Wright). In Be With, he takes every imaginable color of pain and hurls it through the line until, sometimes screaming and other times in reflection, it says, This is what it’s like to look out at the world in this moment. 

If you want to read a poem once and know everything it has to offer, this isn’t for you. But if you want something that dares you to suggest it might fail, you won’t regret picking up this Pulitzer Prize-winner. 

 —Neil Flatman

Arboretum in a Jar 

by Frances Donovan

(Lily Poetry Review Books, 2023)

“ … I wanna do what I want," from the last line of “Pastoral, Poughkeepsie,” encapsulates Donovan's success at writing poems that, ironically, cannot be contained. She writes a new niche by building up, breaking down, and twisting around the modern fairy tale via her intelligent lens, sharing a unique blend of intimacy and hindsight in this melodious collection. The poet reveals “complicated laces”and "coded secrets" via themes of family, sexuality, and identity, and does so the way she wants—masterfully and beyond comparison. 

—Clarissa Adkins

Our Cancers

by Dan O’Brien  

(Acre Books, 2021)

Twenty years after the events of 9/11, the dust continues to settle—in the Battery Park apartment and surrounding neighborhoods where Dan O’Brien and his wife lived and worked, in their breath and bodies, and in the brief 24 hours in which the one cancer journey concludes only to find another lying in wait. Love and nothingness curl around the enjambments and white space of these 101 terse lyric poems, each of which finds O’Brien acknowledging in new ways that “I must find / my way / to live here.”

—Michael McLane

A Book of Days 

by Patti Smith 

(Penguin Random House, 2022)

A Book of Days includes a picture and a caption for every day of the year, revealing music icon and poet Patti Smith’s solid practice of finding beauty within the mundane and imbuing both the objects and people in her world with a special kind of magic, designating all aspects of her life worthy of inspiration. With spare language and dreamy Polaroids, Patti Smith lays her ardor upon the altar. 

 —Shari Zollinger

Tender 

by Sarah Bates

(New Michigan Press, 2020)

Do you ever tire of poems forcing tidy revelations onto things/states that are defined by disorder? (Hi entropy, have a nice bow!) If the answer is yes, check out this mini-collection. Bates’ availability to the all-too-much-ed-ness of both tragedy and minutiae, and her conveyance of “always starting over”—in topic, in form, and in the act of observation—is breathtaking.

 —Nano Taggart

Drift Migration

by Danielle Beazer Dubrasky
(Ashland Poetry Press, 2021) 

Reviewed by Michael McLane

The constituent parts of Danielle Beazer Dubrasky’s collection Drift Migration are, in equal measure, myth and sand. From the retelling of lost loves in the section “Eurydice’s Mirror” to the sandstone compacted over millions of years in Utah and Arizona, from Arachne and the Sand Man to the glint of first sun on the desert, timeless things impose themselves again and again on everyday life and loss in these poems. Labyrinths and their endless choices, made or abandoned, shape Drift Migration, as well. They appear as a book of Borges in the Daedalus Bookshop in her childhood home of Charlottesville, Virginia, as red rock canyons of her adopted Utah home, and as her mother unraveling as if thread, “into remnants we skirt around / to disappear each into our own labyrinth.” At the heart of each, laying in wait to devour reader and speaker whole, is time. It is scaled up and scaled down—the slow unfurling of creosote and fossils in desert rock, myths born a few millennia ago, or the passing of half a century of loss. Whether deep and geologic or the cycle of seasons, miniature or sublime, its appetite remains bottomless, at times monstrous. 

Dubrasky’s poems bring all these varied scales to bear upon lives diverted or blown off course in unexpected ways, as the drift migration of the book’s title suggests, and in its finest moments, superimposes them upon one another in ways that offer up our stories of ourselves, our history, and our planet in a constant state of subversion and revision, at times fragmenting in real time. In “Winter Solstice in the Gorge,” Dubrasky begins:

Our myths turn long nights into cut evergreen

sold on grocery store parking lots, a continent away

from reindeer starving as the Arctic ice dissolves.

Only one star guides the way for diesels lit like Christmas—

miles of commerce that thread the Mojave.

Later in the poem, the face of Norse goddess Freya appears in red rock and dawn comes to a standstill “on a plateau of Kaibab sediment.” Myth rests on the surface of the land like the highway itself, a tangle of desires and needs, a route in constant need of repair and revision at mercy to powers and spectacle beyond our understanding.  

Likewise, in the book’s opening poem, “Phosphenes,” Dubrasky explores the eponymous flashes of light behind our eyelids, maneuvering from the ocean’s photic zone to “starlings in murmuration over fields in autumn” to a prisoner in solitary confinement, their loss of time and its concept manifesting in dreams and hallucinations, “phantom light projected / by cells firing in the retina.” “Phosphenes” is a perfect segue to the first section of the book, titled “The Sand Man,” its last line disappearing “around a curve through the only passage you have ever known.” This is fitting not only because of the importance of the eyes (as well as sleep and dreams) to nearly all versions of traditional Sand Man myths, whether they be the malicious or the innocuous iterations, but because Dubrasky’s version of the Sand Man is in many respects a founding myth of her life, the way in which she navigates the death of her brother which, despite her dreaming him back to existence in various ways, remains a crucible, the only passage she has ever known. The section begins with the title poem, which locates the reader immediately in the harsh desert where the Sand Man dwells:

A billboard: Stardust Motel. The exit sign: Valley of Fire.

Sand and creosote, broken bottles sparkling before his head

smashes the windshield near rows of telephone poles.

His name thrives in a desert as open as the sky

that rains down dry-throated gullies, soaks cleft mud flats.

His name lies flat on the grass near a copper vase filled

with flowers where the road ends in wind and Joshua trees. 

The poems that follow, including the ten-part poem “The Sand Man” that makes up the bulk of the section, move in and out of the siblings’ childhood in Char-lottesville, where they are happy if distant, and a revisioning of Hansel and Gretel, a desert dreamscape or hallucination where the Sand Man is a witch both beneficent and cruel:

He spins music on a turntable, snaps a dance with his fingers,

Pulls a rainbow of scarves through a ring, shades them from the sun 

[ … ]

He pours fire down the brother’s throat

and leaves him pushing grit between his teeth.

While the sister sleeps he steals her eyes

so when she wakes years later

she can’t see the split

he left in her heart.

The timelines conflate repeatedly and it is unclear how much of the speaker’s life with her brother is real and how much imagined. This is part of the Sand Man’s modus operandi, “he appears as an ordinary man taking an evening walk / except for the small bag of sand he carries. // He looks at her as though no time has passed, / as though there is not one where there were two.” Time is cruel, or at the very least indifferent, and Dubrasky perceives the desert in much the same way, at least in the early poems of the book, though there are glimmers of changes ahead, a drift towards a desert time and mindset that encompasses these more immediate losses into something both larger and more delicate. In part ten of “The Sand Man,” she writes:

There are some who wait all their lives to see

The Queen of the Desert bloom at midnight…

Heady perfume opens across the desert

And she sees them all now:

Ghost flower, evening snow, Venus shooting star.

Their grace thrives despite the arid soil. 

She feels more than sees the moon-white petals

Expand in her dark place of sand and blood. 

This is not a change that occurs without many adjustments, as later poems such as “Leaving Virginia” make clear when Dubrasky describes how “Utah houses soften their angles at dusk, / hollyhocks blend with the larkspur. / Women disappear behind graciousness—a smile that tells nothing.” Later in the same poem where the Sand Man and the glass around her brother’s accident are recalled in “the grid streets of a Mormon town. / My first night in the desert, / stars I had only glimpsed through / a humid haze now glitter bright as ice.” But by the time the reader reaches the book’s final section, “Vespers in the Great Basin,” her now longtime home has changed, has unfurled in its impossibly slow way, the remnants of a now-extinct inland sea revealing themselves, as in “Retrieval,” where “in another epoch, creatures in limestone / will taste this new salt abrading / their locked beds—a trail toward home,” or in “Great Basin,” where “the sea left behind is the desert I walk through, / a sorrow slipped between trilobites and shale.” 

While old myths abound in Dubrasky’s work, their contemporary counterparts arise and revise and unravel with the same elegance and heartache as anything in the stories of Eurydice or Arachne. In “One Shot,” she describes going with her family to The Deer Hunter, the theater so crowded they are forced to scatter around the room with the speaker seated next to men who “laughed at the Viet Cong soldiers screaming at De Niro / to pull the trigger in Russian Roulette” only to find that, “when the last scene closed with a toast to that town’s lost son, // the theater silent except one of the men / beside me who wept into his hands.”

The opening night of the film coincided with the suicide of writer Breece D’J Pancake, who shot himself on the property of Dubrasky’s neighbor. The film, the suicide, the war, and the stories we tell ourselves about it, they all leave the community scattered as her family in their seats, leave “a town too stunned to speak.” The night at the theater is only one of numerous moments to subvert the more idyllic memories of Dubrasky’s childhood home, a town that has more recently become infamous for more horrific events. “Daedalus Bookshop” is a poem that is both an ode to the magic of books and bookshops and elegy for innocence, its use of James Agee’s lines about Icarus, “little child take no fright / in that shadow where you are,” taking on far more tragic connotations when we learn in the notes that the shop is just down Fourth Street from the spot where Heather Heyer was murdered by a white supremacist, on a street now named in her honor. 

As such unraveling of stories suggests, home is a nebulous concept in much of Drift Migration, a thing both mythical and literally set in (sand)stone, at once fractured and adaptable. Though Dubrasky states in “Metamorphic” that “perhaps it is too much to carry two places at once,” it doesn’t feel as if that is the end of things, that our lives are so finite or linear. The book’s final poem, “Petroglyphs at Parowan Gap” attests to this, in its assertion and its final question: 

All things crisscross before they disappear into silence

throbbing between jutted rocks…

If we live in dreams, our eyes opening and closing to vistas we create

Unless we step into someone else’s meditation, then which ancient one

Dreamt this intersection of lines—the distant trucker, the men, and myself,

who wander past a length of road into spirals so carefully engraved?

Michael McLane is the author of the chapbooks Fume and Trace Elements. He is a founding editor of the journal saltfront, the review editor for Sugar House Review, and a poetry editor for Dark Mountain. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Western Humanities Review, Colorado Review, Laurel Review, Interim, Utah Historical Quarterly, and South Dakota Review. He currently lives in rural New Zealand where he is completing a PhD at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters.