A few days ago I wrote to you about Baron Wormser's new collection Impenitent Notes. Today I want to talk about another new CavanKerry Press release: Gray Jacobik's memoir in verse Little Boy Blue. As with Baron's collection, CavanKerry had hired me to copyedit Gray's book. But though I had met her briefly several years earlier, when she was the resident poet at the Frost Place and I was a nerve-wracked and unmemorable participant in a seminar that she wasn't teaching, we did not otherwise know one another. All I really knew was that Baron respected her work; so when the manuscript appeared on my desk, I was prepared to be intrigued.

I was not prepared to be overwhelmed.

As everyone who reads this blog with any regularity is already tired of hearing, I am an ignoramus about contemporary poetry. I recognize the famous and semi-famous names, but I have scant familiarity with their work. To a certain degree, my two-year stint on the Beloit Poetry Journal's editorial board forced me to begin recognizing extant fashions in subject and style; but that experience also reinforced my fundamental lack of interest in the poetry of my time. This attitude may be a flaw or it may be a strength; my point here is not to defend or revile it but to note that it is a characteristic. Moreover, unlike Baron's book, which was grammatically precise and punctuationally discreet, Gray's book was a hurricane: it was filled with inconsistencies--for instance, words capped in one stanza, lowercased in the next; numbers spelled out in one stanza, printed as numerals in the next--minor issues in themselves yet, as I discussed in my review of Baron's book, possibly indicative of the poet's distraction. In other words, Gray's book was not a number-1 candidate for my adoration. And yet I could not stop reading it.

Little Boy Blue is the memoir of Gray's troubled relationship with her troubled son, a love-hate affair that was nearly snuffed out at conception, when the teenager discovered that she was pregnant:

. . . I did try to find & couldn't, a back-alley

abortionist in the Negro district of Newport News,

then took thirty pills of quinine

your father's football coach gave him to give me,

leaving me in a coma for three days, pills that

didn't chase you from my body,

although years later I'd learn the tooth buds that

failed to grow in your mouth were caused by the quinine,

& who knows, maybe your bipolar disorder,

maybe your ADHD, & back then doctors thought

nothing of keeping a mother from her newborn

or a newborn from his mother. . . .

This extract quotes from the first poem in the collection, and every piece is just as mesmerizing . . . and excruciating. Imagine writing this autobiographical line: "your girlfriend/called & said I had abandoned you seventeen times,/didn't deserve a son. You'd told her this." Yet as I hope you can begin to see, this book is more, far more, than the history of a lurid family drama. The poems are not blurts onto the page but elegant, sentence-driven explorations of memory, motivation, and human character--both as individual revelation and as the duality of linked personalities, with their mutable and oddly unbreakable chains.

Look at how, in the extract, Gray moves from the abortionist to the doctors' treatment of mother-infant emotional ties. Yes: polemically and imagistically these subjects can be automatic partners, but Gray doesn't rest on such easy-to-make connections. She binds her recollections within the exact and subtle turns of a single sentence--in particular, by means of the quiet words she chooses to connect the phrases that cross both linear time and speculative distance: "then," "although," "maybe." On the surface, these are dull words, throwaways. But for the sentence-driven poet, they are the words that allow us to jumble details--the abortionist, the football coach, the quinine, the ADHD--into a seemingly informal sentence that nonetheless has a distinct and purposeful trajectory. And because Gray attends so carefully to the movement of her sentences, both their sound and their syntactic turns, she is able to create a memoir that works because it does not limit itself to familiar victim narrative but assumes the particular, private, enchanted voice that is the hallmark of real poetry.

Here's a poem in its entirety. Though it's one of the briefer pieces in the collection, the poet still takes her sentence time. Note the variation in length, the shift from simple subject-predicate forms to longer, more complex clausal forms.

Poem 7

You were a funny kid though, kept us in stitches.

You made up little rituals. Your grandfather

likes to tell of how you'd begin a left-right face,

arm-swinging goose-step march from wherever

you were into the bathroom, crying out hep-two,

hep-two. Once there you'd square off, click heels,

center yourself before the toilet, then bark out,

lid up! pants down! underpants down! then squirt!

reversing the order of your commands after the act

was done, your aim the usual aim of a four-year-

old. If your aunts & I were still laughing or

struggling not to when you marched back in,

you'd take umbrage & withdraw, for we were

to understand the seriousness of this. How I wish

I could, just once, kneel down before that boy,

as I would then, & apologize for laughing,

take you in my arms, kiss your cheek or forehead,

& hold your little body against mine.

No one was supposed to laugh at you,

but, my god, you were funny.

Little Boy Blue retells the history of error yet, in so doing, becomes a wondrous lesson in sentence control as dramatic control. I was immensely fortunate to read it. I hope you, too, will find a copy, and read it, and tell me what you think.