Review of Sweet Wolf by Robert McDowell

Publisher : Homestead Lighthouse Press (May 15, 2021) 

Language : English 

Hardcover : 296 pages 

ISBN-10 : 1950475123 

ISBN-13 : 978-1950475124

Price: $24.95

Almost forty years have passed since the heyday of the New Narrative, which centered on McDowell, Mark Jarman, and their journal The Reaper. What happened to this movement was predictable. Critics ignored or dismissed it, the Language school claimed to have transcended it, mainstream poets superficially appropriated some aspects, and the battle the Reaper sought was never joined. The insights of the New Narrative remain, however; they inform the work of certain poets (including this reviewer), and are validated by Sweet Wolf, McDowell’s superb new Selected Poems.

One of those insights was stylistic. In a narrative poem (which may be of any length), the story itself is the primary metaphor; local metaphor – the be-all and end-all of most contemporary lyrics – is substantially reduced. The results are speed, austerity, and power. McDowell’s longer poems in this volume, including the title poem from his collection Quiet Money (1987), “The Pact” and “Red Foxes” from 2002, and “All I Carried with the Sun” from 2014, exhibit these strengths. Most notably in “The Pact,” the influence of Jeffers (with E. A. Robinson the lieber Meister of New Narrative), is tempered by Frostian understatement; the effect is both intense and intimately disturbing.

A second New Narrative intuition was thematic: Story is – both involves and creates – context. It inherently criticizes the static and solipsistic quality of many modern lyrics (a solipsism which, I might add, Language poetry invites readers to share). McDowell is not a political poet; his overarching concern, as we shall see, is gender. The context of his poems is not history or society per se, but the middle distance: a town, a neighborhood, the history of a family or group of friends. He is quite aware, however, of what the powerful are like and what they do to the world; this knowledge informs the painful description of a farm foreclosure in “Red Foxes.” Some later lyrics (in New Poems and elsewhere) attempt, allegorically or symbolically, to link the social macro- and microcosm:

What mirror will your child hold up to you?

What image will he see as you explain

How you voted and paid taxes for designs

That stripped and drained the options from his life,

Or worse, retreated through TV until

A world you never dreamed of walled you in?

Impossible, you say, there is still time.

And yet, this morning, shaving, you see a face

Much older than the one you put to bed.

You hear your son cry out in his slice of yard

(Restricted zone of pleasure, with Fear on the fence),

“I want a horse, some pigs, and black sheep, too!”

You comfort him with bacon, a Galway sweater,

Then bend to model airplane parts and glue.

The boy sits pensively, just watching you.

from “Like Our Fathers Before Us” p. 223

McDowell’s long training in and continued allegiance to narrative affect his lyric poems: these too are precise, unsentimental, and concerned with the context of subjective experience – with seeing it from outside. Poems of the current mainstream (what Geoffrey Hill called “home movies”) often strike me as trying to hide and spin where they seem most to confess. McDowell’s personae, in contrast – whether those of his “I”- or story-poems – have a nakedness reminiscent of Beat poetry. (Two late lyrics praise the honest “stink” of Bukowski.) In Sweet Wolf, all these personae go through three stages, associated with the locations of the poet’s adult life. The first is California, with a pivot to Ireland; the second Oregon; the latest, though still physically in Oregon, is a place in the heart.

In the California poems, the typical persona is a male of the Hemingway era lost among later, confusing expectations, from both others and himself. He can’t live with women or without them. (The obverse is true of women; see especially “The Librarian After Hours.”) Intimacy, not only with women, is both a need and a weakness; the same may be said of compassion. The more aware the persona is of this conflict, the stronger the poem. One of the most memorable is “The Cop from Traffic Accident Control.” Here are the last two of four stanzas:

During my suspension I had time

To play back every illusion I’d swallowed whole –

How I dreamed of squad cars sweet as magnolias

Gliding down to comfort city streets,

Cells for the truly needy, keeping the cold out,

And nightsticks no worse than a father’s love-tap.

At sixteen, hurling a javelin into the sun,

I never imagined the look I’m wearing now.

Some nights I dream I hide myself in the park,

Coming among the lovers like a cold rain.

Arriving late, pulling them from the wreckage,

Sometimes I dream I hear their loved ones weeping.

And what they say of me is true:

That I arrive, a spit-and-polish mop-up,

Reinstated, man with a cancelled expression

And a flat-top haircut, out of date.    (pp. 20-21)

A “liberated” male attitude – the hope for simple equality between the sexes – seems comically impossible. Rivalry intervenes. In “The Liberated Bowler,” Ethel is just a better bowler than Bill, and ends by “wish[ing] for a man who can take it, / This thing she does so well.” In the “Ballad of Maritime Mike,” although Mike “never wanted to change her, / To make a first mate of his wife,” he winds up being “tucked … in bed with hot brandy” while she’s off on another mysterious “dinner date.” Betrayals – of the self by its memories, of men by women and women by men – lead (as in the horrifying “How Does It Look to You?”) to cruelty towards friends. In The Diviners, the book-length family drama represented here by “The Nineties,” the internal, gender-role, and marital conflicts of each generation shape those of the next:

                            “What kept us here so long?

The child we never had? The work? The cash?”

“My parents,” Tom says. “We slipped into their skins,

an obligation, I guess, but now it’s done.”    (p. 69)

Although these themes may sound depressing, the effect is one of bracing honesty and often considerable humor. Tom’s last remark, however, signals a yearning for something better – a community in which happiness and reconciliation are possible. It is sought briefly in Ireland, then in rural Oregon. Some of the Oregon poems strain towards this vision; others achieve it. Perhaps the most moving is “All I Took with the Sun,” a dramatic monologue by a Japanese man who emigrates to Oregon, and his (arranged) fiancée, who comes later. We follow them from 1929 to 1976, through farming, prejudice, the internment camp, return, gradual acceptance, her death and his, and feel that they have achieved, despite everything, Freud’s hallowed pairing of love and work. Something of this tone informs the subsequent short poem, “A Woman and Man Stand Alone in the Street”:

The street is empty.

No human or animal appears.

Even the birds are absent.

They say to each other what

Are we doing here? Where

Is everybody? Lawn sprinklers erupt.

Automatic, the woman says,

Like most of our thoughts – actions

Without meaning, actions while asleep.

And consequences, the man murmurs.

Oh yes, she agrees, always results.

So, what will we do now? the man asks.

Walk, I guess, the woman says.

They slow down at the edge of town,

Listening to the ruckus over the hill.

What do you think? Machinery?

No, she says, it’s people, a lot

Of people. Hear it now?

Sounds like marching. Sounds like weeping,

Yelling, singing. Let’s go, she says. Why?

Because we’re needed. Because we have to.   (pp.. 144-145)

But this Goethean stance is, quite evidently, already undercut by doubt. In the last forty percent of Sweet Wolf, doubt and irony again prevail. The “Oregonian” vision leaves its trace, however; besides bitterness there is a new, sharp, self-examination. Several poems confront the poet’s painful early life, including the death of a sister “who drove all night in a locked garage.”

In narrative poems like “Acorn, the Clown” and “Gang of Chimps,” self-accusation is made delectable by wild humor. The reader even enjoys roaming “The Museum of Me.” Where humor is absent, as in the heartbreaking “The Calapooia Flood,” the theme is embodied in people quite different from the poet. Poems like “The Woman in the Painting” maturely reconsider “the battle of the sexes.” And there are moments of (almost ungrudging) peace:

Mise en Abyme

Aren’t you tired, puny soul,

Of all the knowing that you think you know?

Whirl away down, a spinning top

& sip at the heart of a buttercup.

Remember singing, the lights & applause,

The pleasure that you were part of a cause

In sunlight, rain & rue

That lied or told the truth about you

That nothing hides the gulf between

The creature you were & might have been.  (p. 205)

McDowell’s work is immensely inventive and varied. Writing this review has been frustrating, because it could have emphasized different things: the moving elegies for fellow-poets; the developing strength at fanciful symbolism; the symbols wolf and ledger; the moments of literary satire. What I will praise instead here is, first, the overall tone. It is combative, truthful, unsentimental yet anything but “cold.” Robert Bly is quoted as having said, “I’m a poet because I’m sensitive.” To which McDowell would offer a rude remark, which I’d second. Grief, rage, hope, love and its loss are not “sensitivity,” as the word is commonly used. Neither is honesty. Second: beyond persona and personae, the portrait that emerges from Sweet Wolf is that of a man of our times and of a “man in full” – one whose work should be recognized.