Book Review of Misfit Hearts by Russell Thorburn

Reviewing a second work, Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged, I bowed to him for “bringing it,” to use the sport show cliché. There, he portaled his ancestral stories through music, risk, generational angst and triumph. The poems celebrated many deaths, while along the way highlighted the erotic and its inner physics. His theology and psychology of the generation gap as the first spade-full of dirt that excavates family story, made sense to me. I’m familiar with a shovel, know how to dig, and feel the generation gap turned to bite. I understood his presentation of erotic quivering as the petite mort moving the world, I followed his sport and music angles, and my theological training alerted me to take seriously any writing working to exposes that gap (the generational one) as the first letter in the alphabet of the human condition.

Now, in Misfit Hearts, I’m reading of Thorburn and sons chewing the same chipped bone. He’s evolved beyond generational struggle or the bliss of playing catch in the backyard, beyond the slap of oars and the shock of Albert and Mileva Einstein sitting in a boat arguing, to the mature and Olympian task of expressing his artistic credo. He does, and the clues are written here. We live by grain and rain, pain, and brain. This may be the illustrative quaternio, from which his artistic corpus arises. These four, along with the pathos of Misfit Hearts are heavy in their common, organic, and factual gravity.

These are not troubled poems, they’re not happy poems, but they’re real poems with real subjects. There’s eroticism, there’s alliteration and meter, and there are factual common things becoming more than things: cigarette, pill, comb, and sidewalk.  He puts it like this in “Fathers”: “…So many words/are combustible,/fire burning through to the end/of a phrase. A word in German or Czech,/what is the difference when it’s aflame?”

In these poems, the only subject I find deeper, wider, and more infinite than angst is the pull of love – as when the cowboys eye Marilyn Monroe at the bar fussing with her blonde curls. Thorburn’s words becoming flame create a hot scene, and a half-dozen others, based on John Huston’s film, The Misfits. Perhaps that bar scene is at the end of a long days shoot, when the stage hands, extras, stars and crew gather. Having a drink, in the burning desert, you might imagine it as a potent container giving birth to lust and longing. He does, and the poem leads us into its common gravity.

her thighs sliding across the
soft rubber

               in
the sizzle of grease

               and
corned beef hash, as they envy

               her
for the way her hand

               fusses
with a curl

               limitless
in how they can be twisted

               around
a finger

               her
wide, untested mouth

               cool
as the stream…

His gospel for cowboys is disguised, for it looks at first like a tease, but really its everyman’s limitless hope to be held by the physical image of his anima (Jung’s concept of the ideal feminine within the male). In the stanza above from “Each of the Customers, in the Cool Water of His Glass, Drinks Marilyn Monroe,” Thorburn can trick the reader if he/she doesn’t read the third person pronoun correctly. What is really being twisted around the finger?

Marilyn Monroe is a key subject in five poems. She fuels his muse for some of his finest stanzas in image and meter. In “Six Stills of Marilyn Monroe on Location for The Misfits,” the meter is pleasing and even: “her black dress a shadow/of lust left on the floor,” and again “the last white-coated lie/when the pills talked to her.” The muse doesn’t stop with Marilyn although she certainly animates and agitates; I mark this, and note how I love these poems bristling with intelligent erotic as in “Sting,” and “A Film Is only a Film if You Can Change the Ending,” and “One Week Last Summer.”

From “Sting,” with “her hair, she loved when he touched her,/ a husband who undid the pins/ for her hive of honey. His fingers/ involved in their study of hair, bangs/ over her brow, strands in their/ flight over her ears….” And from “A Film is only a Film if You Can Change the Ending.” “…This place they stood/ side by side, hands fumbling for hands; if they could only/ back each other into the wall, hike a dress, find/ each other’s coda in a fleshly interlude.” Or again in “One Week Last Summer,” “and her nipples are the color/ of this pink orchid, bees in that flute-like sound/ they buzz around the skin/ the dress undone in the heat.”

When I finish some of these poems, I’m overcome with a feeling that’s not always welcome. I know it, I just don’t’ know if it’s classified as a single feeling; it happens when I buy something and spend too much money. I’ve had that feeling a lot and it seems I’m always buying new devices from depressing stores. Mixed into this life draining stress — after spending money — is a fear, connected to loss. Whatever it’s called, that’s the feeling I come away with – not always – but often.

Consider this fourth and final stanza, in the light of that feeling, from “The Opera Is the Saddest Thing to Hear on a Cold Day”:

               Suicide
is the best opera ever, those icy thoughts

               grasping
my brain, wanting only someone

               to
talk to me, a man admiring the knot

               in
the noose about to be thrown up around

               a
chandelier in an empty house.

How does this stanza make you feel? But this feeling, and the situation giving rise to it can also be redemptive in its own way. And while each poem in this volume arises from Thorburn’s deeply experienced credo, you find the mother lode in stanza two of “Rain and Thunder”:

               Since
it rains wildly

               nothing
needs to be done

               and
blessed are the dead that the rain

               rains
upon. But here I pray

               that
it makes me a better man

               who
speaks to the tempest

               and
finds more than loneliness.

THERE IT IS! It makes no difference what metaphor Thorburn uses, for every one of them drags up, dries out, polishes and presents this credo. “I pray that it makes me a better man.” That’s the credo which keeps this poet grinding out the poems even if he’s getting soaked in a brutal rainstorm and nobody else is outside. It’s lonely out there, and he can’t even
borrow an umbrella, but worse, the wind is such a tempest that the dead are almost envied. He knows how to make his point, using the word rain seven times in this poem. But reconstruct rain, as he does, and it becomes the gateway to writing, loneliness, and making him a better man and that’s how self-redemption and sacrifice work in profound ways.

If rain and writing in the storm make Thorburn a better man, crafting poems that are just plain fun help him celebrate it. I found that playfulness in “Babe Ruth Riding Home on the Train to New York City with Apollinaire.” Here, the sultan of swat raps an unlikely conversation with Apollinaire. They need one another’s perspective, and for me, the poem is two home runs on the same page. “The Babe, that other orphan, grabs a porter:/’Bring us sandwiches and a multitude of beers.’/And the Babe wants to know everything about the Eiffel Tower and women, and Apollinaire, a poet,/wants to understand baseball.”

The ladies man wants to understand the poets’ world and the poet wants to understand baseball? Wherever this, I want to live there.

Moses climbed the mountain for sacred words, and since they are sacred, Thorburn uses them with great reverence. This is no poetry for the poorly equipped, the poems and their zeitgeist will keep you on your toes, for while Thorburn doesn’t make a habit of choosing the obscure word, here’s one I didn’t know: somnambulists. Just for fun, try working that one into your next sketch, workshop or assignment.

Thorburn’s Romantic sensibilities remind me more of Coleridge than Wordsworth. His verse is well hung with the grit of an ancient mariner and strung out poet over the righteous rectitude of the Prelude’s stolen boat or naiveté of a blessed babe. Certainly the nightingale and its song shows up in this poet’s musical selections – and they are many – but the piano is a drunken piano, worse yet it’s dangerous. A man watching some other men moving a piano nudges his grandson in “The Drunken Piano,” and says “with a curled lip,/Pianos are killers. The rain streamed/ with ghost images of Jerry Lee/ pounding out how pianos can kill.”

In “All the Friends I Ever Had Are Gone,” Dylan sings but its cacophony.  …”Dylan hell-hounded and snarl-tounged,/as if Hibbing were going to burst in the song/ he’s singing from
World Gone Wrong.” In two other music themed poems, George Harrison plays as if cancer is chasing him, and John Lennon is dripping rain –everywhere! He drips so much that it turns to a river. That’s why Thorburn strikes hammer to the anvil over and over, making sure to craft just the right amount of fun along with the rain, a dual ambition evolving to redemption.

The Babe, on the train ride, concludes his conversation with Apollinaire by bragging of his freedom. I would guess many of us will envy the Babe’s pontification, “the Babe pointing at the horses,/saying, ‘They are wild like me.’”

Everyone finds a few poems in each book that become favorites and a few that one doesn’t care for. Here, I most enjoyed “Autumn,” and “Mingella Wears a Bathrobe at the Porch Door.” When reading Autumn, a Donald Hall poem about leaves came to mind, but even without that reference this poem is autobiographical; I can see him seeing her and the tragicomedy within this delicate sketch:

               Her
tallness reminds me of something so fragile

               that
I can’t even say it, always being far

               from
a kiss, or the fear that scars a heart

               when
I ask about her poems, her smile opens

               wild
precise windows of those nuns

               undressing
for bed; she’s written about their skin

               the
color of chrysanthemums.

               She’s
slender as we stand together.

               I
want to pull one of her braids like I did

               to a
girl in second grade.

In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, autumn is short-lived, the beast of winter is about to crash the party and everyone living there knows it. That’s why, as this tall girl ends her shift and “prepares to enter a dark October,” a high crisis point exists. I love the tension here as I sense ice and winter’s obliteration of the delicate.

In “Mingella Wears a Bathrobe at the Porch Door,” Thorburn notes the yard is full of leaves and tosses the paper like a fastball to the strike zone of Mighella’s front porch door. “Minghella, bald and pajamas undone/ to a silver chest, doesn’t notice a leaf/ dripping on his head, nor his bare feet/ deep in some frozen cellar.”

Minghella is presented via the facts, yet I see a complicated customer. He doesn’t understand what the leaves say as they swirl around, nor does he feel the leaf on his head; he fails to appreciate the paperboy, and he appears to be frozen and stuck in ice. Yes, it looks bleak, but then Thorburn presents the paper as a baton, a sword and “winter’s old bone,” and amazingly Minghella notices this. The presentation of this pajama-clad persona creates a rock-hard duality for every reader. It can keep you thinking for a long time.

Critics will certainly accuse Thorburn of being too white-male centered and that is the ground from which he rose. Yet cancer strikes both genders and loss and love know no bounds. Still, all of us are bound by our life and locale. The question is will we stay bound?

I found “Dust Jacket Photo” went one stanza too long and this is a criticism I’ve leveled before. In “George Harrison Wants to Play My Son’s Guitar,” I was on a journey with Thorburn, his son, and 50 percent of the Beatles. A journey where ghosts were rising up rather than coming down from the rafters or through the walls. The poem raises a premonition of John Lennon’s assignation and George Harrison’s cancer; however, the poem  moved from the driving edgy grit of rock and roll and his story of now-dead Beatles, back to himself and the pastoral image of his heart in a chord. Like a bat going blind and missing the ball, this last part missed the mark for me; sometimes the musician can get in the way of the poet.

I understand drive and excavation, meta theory, and metaphor in writing. I get the technical and the artistic, the hermeneutic and historical, but until now I didn’t really get the sacrifice, the pain, and the haunting beauty of rain on the head. How do you poets do it? How and why do you sweat, anguish, and fight with yourself and others over each word for at best, a half-pence?

I read Thorburn’s poems and I know. I know because I read his answer to himself . . . “to make me a better man.”