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By Charles Rammelkamp
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“we are what happens by accident,” Joshua Rivkin writes in the first “Envoi” of this lyrical, emotionally probing collection, and goes on:
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Suitor, from the Latin secutor,
to follow. I can’t
catch them, or let them go —
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So much of the poetry in this book is about desire, the Joie de Vivre it provides and the mistakes and tragedies it can cause. Or, as he writes in the second “Envoi” that bookends the collection, meditating on an orange peel “wound over the core of an apple —”:
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imperfect as the marriage
of memory and desire.
Our bodies hunger
and can’t remember for what.
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We make the same mistakes over and over again, propelled by our desires. “A New Old Story About Want” is a title that hammers this home. As Rivkin later notes in “Suitor’s Dream,” “I want to begin again.
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A new desire is an old one rising.
Old mistake. Old news.
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The heart of Suitor is about inherently dysfunctional families, his in particular, about fathers and sons, oddly suited partners, mothers looking for love, everybody looking for love.
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At the physical heart of Suitor, indeed, is a 20-page prose meditation on the moral ambiguities of people titled “The Haber Problem.” Making an implicit comparison between his father, an internationally admired oceanographer, often absent from his family on research expeditions – until he leaves the family altogether, via divorce – and the Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Franz Haber, whose discoveries led to gas warfare in World War I and Zyklon B, the gas used in concentration camps in World War II to murder Jews (Haber, ironically, was a German Jew), Rivkin ponders the moral legacy a man leaves behind him. Rivkin cites one historian’s observation about Haber: “People don’t know whether to admire him or despise him.” On the one hand his discoveries led to artificial fertilizers, expanding how much can be grown, feeding people, and on the other, Haber was an enthusiastic gas warrior and a really horrible husband who drove his wife to suicide. His son likewise killed himself.
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Just so, Rivkin constantly re-evaluates his own father, a boastful guy very much enamored of his own abilities and accomplishments, to the point of obnoxious arrogance. He is a man who has likewise caused emotional pain for his wife – and son. His father has “anger he carries like a pocket watch.”
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The disturbing thing for Rivkin, though, is in his observation that “every father is a window. And in the right light, that window can be a mirror.” He quotes an unnamed poet: “Let us be gentle when we question our fathers.”
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Indeed, who among us could stand up to the same microscopic scrutiny? In the poem, “The Ad,” Rivkin suggests something like this. The poem begins with an allusion to a classifieds dating profile:
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The ad I answered asked for me
or the man I wanted
to be. On paper we sing.
In flesh, we’re off-key.
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Do we ever measure up to our ideals? Life gets in the way. We can’t always live up to our self-conceptions. He treats his lover badly, ghosting him until he goes away. The poem ends:
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The man I promised
to be – taller, surer,
content – left too.
On paper I sing.
In flesh I run.
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Rivkin’s verse predominantly consists of these short lines, the language spare, allusive, vivid, wise. The two parts of poems that are broken up by “The Haber Problem” in the center are like mirror images. Both begin with multi-part poems entitled “The Suitors” and “Envoi” followed by a handful of lyric poems.
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The suitors Rivkin catalogs in part one are the men who wooed his mother after his father left, making the reader think of Penelope and Telemachus (or not). “My mother’s third boyfriend owned a Peugeot / he let me drive over the Choptank River Bridge.” Another suitor (or a different view of the same one?):
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He was a different kind of wisdom poet –
faith in real estate, rolls of Lifesavers
and Amway. He sold cleaning supplies
and cologne from his Buick’s backseat.
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The “suitors” in the second part are Rivkin’s own lovers, male and female. One of these segments begins:
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Her mother warned her never to date a writer.
Or become one.
They have no skills in this world
just lies and sweet talk
mixing up the story they tell
and the story they live.
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Hah! But this also gets at the perplexing dichotomy Rivkin riffs on throughout between a person’s self-conception and his or her actual life. “The Docent,” from part two, further digs into the duplicity of relationships. Again referring to classical literature, this “docent” can be seen as a sort of Virgil figure (or not), but turned on its head.
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We lied about our first meeting.
We lied to our friends. To each other.
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Rivkin ends the poem by addressing the docent himself about this essentially misguided relationship: “My coy guide,” he writes,
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where are we going? When will we arrive?
What will we call that place?
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But of course, it always comes back to the mothers and fathers. In the poem “Tashlich,” from the first part, referring to the Jewish custom on Rosh Hashanah of symbolically tossing your sins away in the water with bread crumbs, the speaker unloads everything into the stream, shirts, socks, pants, wallet.
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the watch from your wrist, a name,
shame, a stubborn reflection that holds to you
as you hold to it,
your father’s voice, your mother’s eyes.
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Toward the end of the collection, sounding almost like a Yiddish curse (“May you be so rich your widow’s husband never has to work a day” or “May your teeth all fall out except one so you can still get toothache,” are classic examples), Rivkin writes in “At Night You Read to Me”:
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If I write again about my father
may my hands fall off,
my tongue harden to obsidian.
Or give me the punishment of myths:
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my son will never speak to me;
or he’ll speak to me in that tone, write
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every mistake, tell all I’ve done wrong
and regret every word.
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Suitor is a satisfying read on many levels, both admirable as artistic expression and valuable as self-reflection, uncovering certain universal truths about all families.
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Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. His most recent releases are Sparring Partners from Mooonstone Press, Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books and Catastroika from Apprentice House.
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North of Oxford 