After The Fall: Poems Old and New by Edward Field
Review by Philip Clark

Before any proper review can be written, one fact simply must be acknowledged: a new book by Edward Field is an event for poetry and for gay literature. In the 45 years since his first book, Stand Up, Friend, with Me, won the Lamont Poetry Prize, Field has produced a uniformly readable body of poetry. If this sounds like faint praise, it’s not. How often poets seem determined not to be understood! Field’s direct, almost prosy verse—with its strong emphasis on politics, its celebration of sex and the body, and its recognition of the pitfalls that can come with a life well-lived—never suffers from this problem. He works an accessible magic, writing poems that sneak up on his readers. A piece that appears to meander suddenly crystallizes, making its point in a way that looks effortless. Don’t be fooled, though. These are crafted, vivid poems, and they leave a mark. Here’s the highest possible praise for Ed Field’s work: it has the power to make a poetry fan of even those suspicious of the genre.

Off the soapbox and on to After the Fall.

Field has always had a political sensibility, from “Ode to Fidel Castro” in his initial collection, Stand Up, Friend, with Me (1963) to the Cavafy-takeoff “Waiting for the Communists” in the more recent Counting Myself Lucky (1992). Of the new pieces in After the Fall, fully half qualify as political poems, culminating in the lengthy title poem’s devastating examination of the destruction of the World Trade Center. From the opening “Credo,” where he questions poetry’s purpose “if it doesn’t speak out, denounce what’s going on,” Field levels attack after attack at “Bush and his gang,” with their warmongering and destruction of civil liberties. These frequently prosy poems can use humor to make their points, as when he advises “anyone who looks like an Arab these days” not to “snap any photos at the airport / even of your cousins arriving from St. Louis” (“Homeland Security”) or suggests that “bunched up between the straps” of President Bush’s parachute harness, “there’s nothing there” (“Mission Accomplished”). Even the funniest poems have a serious heart, though, and “After the Fall” asks tough questions about fault and blame for 9/11. In his choice of images and examples—from the destruction of Afghan towns by Genghis Khan to the day “the ancient world shuddered” with the fall of the Colossus of Rhodes—Field observes the tenuous state of civilizations, especially in the face of human destructiveness. The poem’s final image, of “the fragments that were left…the heaps of rubble / we pray over,” seems to assert the inevitability of this destructiveness. A bleak vision, perhaps, but “After the Fall” is the weightiest of Field’s new political poems, and it has the greatest ultimate effect.

“After the Fall” is particularly appropriate coming from Field, a long-time New York City resident who “can’t stop looking south along the river” toward Ground Zero. For decades, he has written affectionate poems honoring New York City. Field’s cast of New Yorkers include “the grizzled poet / who slept in Village doorways” (“The Winners and the Losers”) and the “bright-eyed kids” who mark up the subways in “Graffiti,” who “put a beard on the fashionable lady selling soap” and “leave behind a wall scrawled all over with flowers / That shoot great drops of gism through the sky.” He laughs at critics who focus on “junkies, muggings, dirt, and noise,” preferring the city’s “people paradise” learning how to “go slowly in the midst of the rush of novelty” (“New York City”). Even a poem like “The Last Bohemians,” addressed to a fellow Greenwich Village veteran and eulogizing the loss of the Village’s bohemian character, brims with the city’s tumbling energy:

Leftovers from the old Village, we spot each other
drifting through the ghostly,
high-rental picturesque streets, ears echoing
with typewriters clacking and scales and arpeggios
heard no more, and meet fugitive in coffeeshops,
partly out of friendship, but also, as we get shabbier and rarer,
from a sense of continuity, like, hey, we’re historic!

He acknowledges that “it’s safer, with couples in from the suburbs / browsing the antique shops,” but Field looks at the change with suspicion, living as “a ghost in a haunted house.” “There’s nothing radical left…nothing for the young to believe in,” he complains – cranky, but correct.

Elsewhere, After the Fall retains this prominent sense of the costs of change, particularly in relation to aging and its effects on the body. To confront old age, there’s “The Bukowski Option,” where one can imitate rebel poet Charles Bukowski, “express all your nastier impulses / and tell the world to go fuck itself.” Field, who is in his 80’s, feels that he has instead chosen “the discipline of Dignity…as a protection and disguise / for my battered dreams.” Bullshit! The world is so hesitant to entertain honest discussion of the body or sex or old age that anyone, like Field, who so directly addresses such topics cannot help but be seen as Bukowski’s heir. These poems are frequently tongue-in-cheek, as in “In Memory of My Foreskin” or “A Man and His Penis,” where Field requests that the title member “stand up, old friend, with me / and take a bow.” The jokes only enhance his wonderfully unsentimental look at growing old and everything that entails. In one poem, a Parisian restaurant patron sobs, “Je suis vieux, je suis vieux!”; fortunately, Field’s narrative voice is never that maudlin about aging. “I’m eighty and life’s quite normal-- / still walking around, still jacking off,” Field writes, although potential dangers lurk in the form of:

…the Village Nursing Home that I pass every day.
We’re waiting for you, the attendants’ faces say,
as they enjoy their cigarettes on the sidewalk
or chat on their cellphones.
And the wrecks in wheelchairs out front
look at me grimly as I lope by, which I read as,
You think you’re so smart, Pops,
you’ll soon be right here, with us. (“Dead Man Walking”)

Until then, there will be no complaining, no stopping for Field. As he says in “Prospero, in Retirement,” “as long as I can get / my ass and my wheelie to Kennedy Airport, / I’ll keep going, keep going, keep going…”

One obvious spur to Field’s continued happiness and productivity past his eightieth birthday has been his relationship with his long-time partner and sometime literary collaborator, Neil Derrick. Derrick receives direct reference in poems dating back to the 1960s; in Variety Photoplays (1967), a collection heavy on pop culture and film references ranging from Frankenstein to Joan Crawford to the comics’ Nancy, Field finds time to transform him into a “Giant Pacific Octopus.” Derrick’s blindness puts Field into the role of caregiver, chronicled in the black humor of “Blinks”:

He’d like being blind to be classier,
and imagines a Broadway musical, Blinks on Parade,
with a row of chorus boys in high-style mirrored sunglasses,
tapping their white canes back and forth to a jazzy beat

Field good-naturedly gripes about this situation, but new poems like “Mrs. Wallace Stevens” show how grateful he feels for Neil’s organized, steadying presence in his life. Shedding poetic devices at the end of “Taking My Breath Away,” Field makes the declaration forthright: “Over forty years later he’s still in my life, / and I’m still dazzled, the luckiest man alive, / the man with everything.”

The same can be said of Edward Field. Over forty years after his first book, he’s still in poetry readers’ lives. Over forty years later, the work still dazzles.

Read poems from After The Fall
Click HERE from more reviews...

 

Philip Clark is a Washington D.C.-area writer and editor. He spent three years (2001-2003) as poetry editor for The William & Mary Review. Currently, he is at work on an anthology of poetry by writers who died from AIDS. He welcomes all correspondence at philipclark@hotmail.com. He is not nearly as staid as this bio note makes him sound.

Online Fiction: "Just Another 'Night with the Coach' Story"