Michael Blumenthal’s No Hurry: Poems 2000-2012. Wilkes-Barre: Etruscan Press. 2012. Review by Stephen Massimilla
In No Hurry, Michael Blumenthal reaffirms that powerful poetry can be accessible and complex at once. The poet is in the autumn of life, in “no hurry”: careful not overlook everyday pleasures or even to skirt painful realities. As a wisdom poet, he rejects quick fixes. Though he pays homage to such heroes as Tennyson, Yeats, James, Bishop, and Larkin, Blumenthal also eschews bookish allusions and tonal affectation. As in the past, Blumenthal addresses us as “friends,” as if we were being given access to the poet’s complex conversations with himself.
Blumenthal continually reminds us that honesty is a complicated challenge. The speaker of the first poem in the collection takes an unflinching look into a dominatrix’s chamber in the Atelier Rhinegold, a room from which a client can exit into “a world / made whole again for a fee, / a kindly universe where there’s a cure / for every unlived fantasy a life provides.” Only a skeptical and courageous writer could even begin to treat—or at least diagnose—the conditions of life in our frustrating, ailing world, given that even a temporary “cure” provided “for a fee” is a masochistic fantasy. By opening his book with such an unexpected “exit,” Blumenthal signals that he will not favor factitious comedic endings. In “The Rabbi Prepares a Wedding Poem,” Blumenthal identifies the rabbi as “duty bound to all that can be recited / from a podium,” which precludes even mentioning the “dangerous” facts. In another poem, the poet suggests that it is better to admit that even the nightingale must at times sing “alone” and “in praise of deceitfulness” and “impossible love” (“Because Marriage Is Not for Romantics”). The tone here is both down-to-earth and wistful, both biting and tinged with unfulfilled longing.
Indeed, much of what Blumenthal reveals can be communicated only through his complex tone. Notice how the speaker of “Background Music” undercuts what the opening line—“If you are lucky in love”—would lead us to expect: “If you are lucky in love / someone will become the background music / to your own life // listened to but not actually heard….” What an effectively indirect way of suggesting that the speaker is culpable of having overlooked his loved one’s needs, “as if the music were playing in another room.” An alternative to oblique self-indictment could have involved ignoring or denying his own self-absorption, or perhaps confessing his perceived failings outright; but, as we are warned in the villanelle “Le Choix,” the choice between dying and lying “is always painful, and unclear.” When it comes to questions of frankness and deception, sexual desire and love, one’s own needs and another’s, there is no easy shortcut to bearable honesty.
Besides the earned honesty and tonal mastery of his poetry itself, what in this troubled world does the poet give us to celebrate? I’m tempted to say that Blumenthal would not entirely disagree with Rilke about the poet’s duty to praise and bless whatever he can—provided, Blumenthal might add, that this praise is often drowned in bitterness. “I know that wherever we find beauty needs to be praised,” the poet asserts early on, only then to tell us that one “beauty” in question was a young Jewish woman being admired by the Nazi soldier who was pushing her into the gas chamber (“A Photo of Terezin”). If “Grace may not be merited, / friends, but nonetheless deserves to be praised,” how confidently are we to sing the world’s praises in the midst of injustice? (“Blessed”). And in a book that refers to the global economic downturn and all kinds of personal losses, only Blumenthal could coin phrases like “the blessed burdens of our disenfranchisements” and “the sense of our own sinfulness.” (“Not the Soul”). In “The Human Condition,” the poet’s “bethren of the mid-range,” those likewise facing aging and death, are, Blumenthal suggests, still free to celebrate “birdsong and the wild graffiti / of the everyday,” along with the blessings of the “next” life. That next life (like this life), after all, is “there for the asking like the garbage, / just waiting to be taken away.” For a seasoned Jewish writer with a distrust of claims to the romantic and the transcendent, what could be more “everyday” than this birdsong graffiti and that afterlife garbage?
Given the complex uniqueness of his oeuvre and voice, Blumenthal not only helps us to face bitter realities: he also practices kindness and compassion, and he can be hysterically funny. Imparted with music as buoyant and lovely as it is turbulent, what comes through, in spite of everything, is the poet’s bigheartedness and unabashed willingness to investigate. In a moving tribute, Blumenthal expresses gratitude for all he has learned from his various relatives in and through their struggles, strategies, and sufferings (“Genetics”); and he is both touching and wittily satiric in his honorary dirge to a pigeon that perished because it was perhaps “as bored of false praise as I was” (“The Pigeon”). Most appositely, Blumenthal adopts a tone at once quirky, enchantingly lyrical, and profound in his praise of “moles,” those scribblers persistently digging, mining the subconscious dark of the writer’s mind (“Moles”). The unhurried product of that pursuit is a productively troubling book, a multifaceted statement of courage, of moral and aesthetic purpose. It is in this spirit that, at the end of “Self-Help,” the poet urges us to speak out so that:
the books that once gave us so much bad feeling
toward our happier selves can go on doing their work
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