I’m currently reading Of Song and Water by Joseph Coulson (Archipelago Books) for a review. It’s a nice shift for me — I’d read a few of the magical realism-type books in a row, and being completely enamored with that type of story, a break is a good idea, lest I burn myself out. About halfway through it now, and decidedly not magical realism. I get the feeling reading this that I do when I read Tobias Wolff — that building feeling of excitement, reading prose so deceptively simple and straightforward that packs such a punch. As we’re currently going over name possiblities for baby #2, I liked this line:

His grandfather used to say that a great name guarantees success. “It shouldn’t be a placeholder,” he insisted, “or a catchall for loose ends. It shouldn’t be given lightly, whether to a boy, a boat, or a business, not when dreams, even fate, hang in the balance.”

On playing jazz guitar in a trio:

Coleman showed a gift for melody, stating a theme but then leaving it, traveling sad and complex distances until he reached an isolated world, a strange land where virtuosity mattered far more than being part of any group or scene. At that point, having used up most of what he knew, he’d return in unexpected ways, playing familiar strains that seemed part of some deep and reawakened memory. Brian laid down the bottom with a steady poise, but when he took the lead, bursting out with his smile and his exuberant assurance, the music changed direction, moving into a realm that felt like church, as if a divine revelation were close at hand. He was also, along with Tom, an arbiter of dynamics, building the moment to a crescendo or reducing it to near silence. Tom kept all this together, marking time, using the brushes like a magician, reigning the guitar or bass when he thought either had gone too far.

 

I’ll post other excerpts as time allows before I finish the review. Lots of pages dog-eared in this one. I like Coulson’s understated style, making everything seem like the passing of a quiet day in the life of a somewhat elderly gentleman — which parts of the book are, and other parts are more dynamic times, but still being seen through that older man lens. I’m enjoying it.

 

Joseph Coulson’s second novel, Of Song and Water, concerns a jazz musician coming to endings: a career on the skids because of hands that can no longer make the chords he needs; a boat, falling apart and weighted with memories of his father, and of his father’s father before him (both men casting long shadows); a divorce; a former love he walked away from for his music; and a daughter preparing to leave for school.

 

All the ingredients are in place for a sprawling social novel, intertwining the changing face of race relations in the second half of the 20th century with the progression of the Moore family from illegal booze-running during Prohibition to financial success in a boating store, and finally back to a broken-down jazz musician who cannot escape his forebears and drives a delivery truck—a beer delivery truck—to make ends meet. In a sense Of Song and Water is this book, but Coulson’s writing doesn’t sprawl. It’s boiled down—the style of this work is more in line with the music his protagonist Coleman Moore plays: simple in presentation, a three piece group instead of Armstrong’s All Stars.

 

Throughout the novel Coulson leaves everything open to interpretation until, suddenly, he doesn’t, and we see why things are the way they are. It’s a device Coulson uses effectively and subtly. We are given confusing bits of information about Moore’s grandfather, H.M.—Havelock Moore, the aforementioned rum runner, a true life pirate with more than one secret hidden away. The narrative moves forward in time, with Coleman’s father telling him that H.M. “doesn’t have a face,” then back in time to H.M. as a young man, struggling with the end of Prohibition. We progress forward again to the dark resolution of a problem landlord who is harassing H.M.’s elderly, widowed mother. Moving back and forth in this way, only giving the reader bits and pieces of the whole story, is not a new idea, but Coulson does it like a master. Across movements foreword and backward in both Coleman’s memory and within the stories found in those memories, one is never lost.

 

Because of this style, Coleman seems at times to know more than he should—How does he know what lies in H.M.’s heart and in his father’s heart? Yet as the narrative unfolds we learn how Coleman discovered what he knows: either by uncovering external information or by looking into his own heart, which is not so different from the hearts of those who came before him.

 

As the story travels among three generations of Moores we see young Jason Moore choosing to become Coleman Moore, a name that sounds more jazz-worthy to him. We see him studying with an elderly jazz legend who lives nearby—a black man, for whom Jason cuts grass—and paying for it when a group of Jason’s peers disapprove of him associating with blacks:

 

Schoolmates in bright white T-shirts come tearing down the street shouting and laughing. He can feel them gaining and knows that if he looks over his shoulder he’ll lose speed, but he can’t resist and his head begins turning and he sees a boy almost at his heels. He rounds the corner and spots the familiar fence and jumps over the closed gate but catches his foot and goes sprawling on the tiny front lawn—on the thick grass that should have been cut before now except that the rain made it impossible. He starts to get up when a boy pounces on his back and holds his face to the ground, cursing in his ear. He hears the voices of the other boys closing in and they fall on him, too, their fists pounding his rib cage and the back of his head, and all the boys yelling or screaming, ‘Nigger pile. Nigger Pile.’

At the bottom, he can’t breathe, already breathless from running, and he believes that he’ll suffocate, drown in the watery grass, and he feels a hot pressure building behind his eyes, his arms and legs pinned to the ground, when suddenly a tremendous blast, an explosion, blows everything into silence.

He looks up. The weight rolls off his body. On the porch steps is Otis with a shotgun aimed at heaven.

We see Coleman’s father, Dorian, shedding the trappings of his father’s legacy—transforming from a rum-runner to an extremely successful boating supply store owner—and how it leaves Coleman the son adrift; walled off from his family’s history, there’s nothing to turn back to when his jazz hands fail him. Coleman works at restoring his father’s boat, trying to find a new vocation. “Time drags or runs like water,” again and again, sprinkled throughout the text like signposts: the story struggles against time, relinquishes itself to the current, and then struggles again. Happy endings, when they come, are bittersweet—nothing is taken without something else being lost.

 

Which brings us back to the jazz. Either Coulson has played jazz or he is a very thorough researcher. The passages with Coleman watching others play, or taking the stage himself, are wonderful in their evocation of the mood of a performance.

 

Moreover, the novel itself is pervaded with the feel of jazz. Like the best of the smoky, slow-burn works,Of Song and Water unfolds with deceptively simple writing, the meaning and feeling building up almost unnoticed. Characters move in and out of the main storyline like players moving forward to deliver a bass solo, a drum solo.

 

Flourishes, when they come, are small. Words are chosen carefully to build each idea and, in turn, the story; the overall effect is like Coleman’s music—understated, steady bass undercurrent, drum flourishes, and guitar work that, if you’re only partway listening, seems competent enough, but when you give yourself up to the story, let it settle around you, can change the colors in the room.

 

Music and nearly magical evocations of a Midwest landscape shape Coulson’s debut, The Vanishing Moon (2004). In his second novel, he portrays a jazz guitarist with grievously injured hands and a complicated relationship with Lake Huron. A third-generation sailor, Coleman, down-and-out and divorced, struggles with his disability (the price of hubris) and tries to be a good father to his wise teenage daughter. Haunted by his rumrunner grandfather and volatile father, he has inherited his father’s boat, the Pequod, a clue to Coulson’s subtle riffing on Moby-Dick. Patterns of dark and light shift and morph like shadows on water as Coulson choreographs complicated relationships between Coleman, who is white, and black musicians, including his honorable teacher. Coulson’s complexly elegiac tale is, in part, a tribute to his mentor, poet and Great Lakes mariner Stephen Tudor. Love abandoned, violence sustained, guilt, grief, the transcendence of sailing and making music, all play in jazzlike counterpoint. Coulson’s rhapsodic novel progresses from harsh equations of black and white to an exaltation of color.

 

 

 

In the American Midwest, the presumptive pastoral calm and social conformity associated with the term is more myth than reality. Heartland weather is capricious and extreme. Temperatures abruptly shift, clouds boil up against clear skies, thuggish winds wreak havoc, storms rampage. And this meteorological drama is often matched by human turmoil, ensuring that the Heartland is a place registering harrowing confrontations and abrupt disorder.

 

Born in Detroit, Joseph Coulson is closely attuned to the region’s gently rolling land and chimerical sky, as well as its majestic Great Lakes. He also knows a thing or two about the cadences of an urban core ravaged by the divisions of race and class. A poet and playwright as well as a novelist, Coulson is a meticulous stylist who manages to align the tumultuous inner world of his characters with the sensuous outer world. The Vanishing Moon (2004), Coulson’s much praised debut novel, followed the lives of a midwestern family coping with blindness and other tragedies: the Great Depression, World War II, the violence of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the quandary of two brothers in love with the same woman, a gifted pianist. Coulson is also a musician—and the lyricism of his prose reflects that fact—and in this new novel, he writes of music and musicians with rare understanding.

 

Of Song and Water tells the story of a talented but burdened jazz guitarist. Coleman Moore, born Jason, is a third-generation Lake Huron sailor as well as a musician. He drives a beer truck, in pale imitation of his grandfather Havelock’s nervy and profitable escapades as a rumrunner who navigated the dark waters between Canada and Detroit. Coleman inherited his father’s sailboat, where he often take refuge: drinking and brooding, docked in Humbug Marina. Not only doesn’t he sail anymore, he doesn’t play the guitar much, either. His hands are damaged, stiff and cramped. Sometimes the pain “grows like a rolling fire, waves of misery that pressure and pills cannot relieve.” The pain is in his heart, too, for he can barely stand to listen to music anymore—music reminds him of all he has lost. Divorced, he tries to be a good father to his wise-beyond-her-years 17-year-old daughter, but he doesn’t make much money and he doesn’t have much to show for himself.

 

Coulson renders time fluid and circular, slipping from the present to the past without warning. In one paragraph, the reader is privy to Coleman’s thoughts as he climbs on board his father’s boat on a bitter winter night; the next paragraph skips back to his grandfather’s life. Toughened by the Great War and harboring a secret far more explosive than trafficking in contraband whiskey, Havelock goes legitimate, establishing Halyard & Mast Marine Supply in Bay City, near Saginaw, Michigan. Happiest while sailing alone on Lake Huron, Havelock names his son Dorian, which means “from the sea.” When Dorian finally acquires his own boat, one made of fiberglass rather than wood, his father condemns it as a “plastic tub,” and tells Dorian’s son, Jason, that a wooden boat “is a living thing because it’s made of living things. There’s no life in plastic. It’s empty. It’s blank—like a white whale.” Dorian christens his boat Pequod, and the reader becomes alert to allusions to Moby-Dick, a masterpiece not to be casually looted.

 

Coleman’s fraught family memories are spliced with memories of his initiation into music. Hired to cut a neighbor’s grass, young Jason is hooked from the instant he sees Otis Young’s guitar and picks it up without hesitation or permission. Somehow “he felt more like himself just holding it.” Otis, who once played with such greats as Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and John Coltrane, recognizes a kindred spirit in the boy, and offers lessons. Otis is a haloed character; the reader can’t help but wonder if Coulson was thinking about his teacher and mentor, the poet Stephen Tudor, when he created Otis. The novel is dedicated to Tudor, the author of Haul-Out: New and Selected Poems and a devoted Great Lakes mariner. Tudor was lost on Lake Huron in 1994, a haunting death that may have inspired some of the incidents in this melancholy novel.

 

It turns out that Coleman spent his best years playing with a bassist named Brian—who would prove to be an extraordinarily valiant and generous friend—and a drummer named Tom. Their group, the CBT Trio, would garner praise for their “elegiac mood,” a phrase that perfectly describes the novel’s timbre. Of Song and Water emulates jazz in its fractured time, syncopated language, and rich variations on a theme. As Coleman thinks about Otis and his immeasurable influence, he remembers being hassled by other white boys for spending time with a black man. He also recalls his choice of Coleman for a stage name, one commonly associated with African Americans, and his fear that “any value or substance he had, any claim to authenticity, came from playing jazz with a black man. In the back of his mind, he wondered if he was really an imposter, a fraud.” But his enthrallment to music is genuine, his ambition immense. He chooses music over his relationship with Jennifer, and loses his one true love. And his hubris, combined with racial tensions, lead to his downfall at the site of his greatest triumphs, the Green Mill, Chicago’s legendary jazz club.

 

Coulson navigates a narrow channel between poetic fiction and melodrama, charting his course with a set of not always finely calibrated symbols and metaphors. The dialogue is as nimble and affecting as the virtuoso music of the jazz guitar masters that Coulson cites, from Wes Montgomery to Joe Pass. Coulson’s complicated characters are rendered with resonant detail, the gleanings of close and avid observation. He has a knack for creating intriguing female characters, including Coleman’s over-the-top landlady, a bossy and sexy evangelical who stands in sly counterpoint to a malevolent landlord who has the misfortune of meeting up with Havelock. Coleman himself, battered by booze, still manages to be at once morose and funny, absolutely determined to overcome his pain and exorcise his demons. He still hears his grandfather declaring, “A Moore never sinks,” a piece of pure bravado that both Havelock and Dorian rather horrifically disprove, but a mantra Coleman hopes will sustain him.

 

The thorny relationships Coulson choreographs in this book embody in provocative ways questions of power and social convention. Of particular notice is Brian’s immense kindness. He takes Coleman in and cares for him after his hands are brutally injured, generosity that proves the adage “No good deed goes unpunished” when bigoted neighbors make trouble, believing the friends are a racially mixed gay couple.

 

Coulson evokes the rapture Of Song and Water, the transcendence found in playing music and sailing. His hero thinks, “Music was a fast-running stream, an unspoken prayer.” That’s what Coulson wants his fiction to be, a conduit to a higher power, a way to feel free, however fleetingly, from the weight of the self. Sailing, music, literature—each engenders connection and rises above it at the same time. For most of this many-fathomed novel, Coulson stays in the groove. When he falters and drifts, it’s because he’s trying too hard; the story line can feel contrived. He gets caught in the wake of Melville’s Pequod and all the splendor of Moby-Dick’s metaphors and moral calculus—not that it isn’t pleasurable to ponder Coulson’s variations on Melville’s themes, but such moments intrude on the spell he casts.

 

What of crippled Coleman Moore? He learns harsh lessons about the cost of ambition, and he discerns a strange and troubling truth: we inherit the moral failings and crimes of the generations who have gone before. Coleman “considers whether or not the sacrifice of his hands served as some sort of redemption, a strange rite of passage—a fated balancing of the scales.” Does such reasoning help? “I’ve paid for more than my crimes,” he says. “And no schedule of penance will restore my hands.” But Coleman can alleviate his loneliness and all the beautiful imagery Coulson has seeded throughout this story eventually blossoms in a shower of redemption.

 

Of Song and Water, a more tightly focused novel than Coulson’s first, derives its unique style from jazz and does a fine job examining the ways that social tensions exert pressure on individual lives not in terms of historic events, but as manifested in personal conflicts.

 

Coulson (The Vanishing Moon) mines a put-out-to-pasture jazz guitarist’s halcyon past and hardscrabble present in a poignant sophomore outing. It’s 2003 and Jason Moore (on stage, he was Coleman Moore) lives near Detroit, driving a beer delivery truck. Though his battered hands can no longer handle a guitar, they work well enough for drinking, which he does frequently while reminiscing about his band, the CBT Trio, once the toast of Chicago. Other frequent rumination topics are Maureen-the girl he married and lost-and Jennifer-the girl he didn’t marry. Tragic memories of his paternal grandfather Havelock and father, Dorian, both skillful sailors, also haunt Jason. The one joy in his life is his 17-year-old daughter Heather, though they, too, hit a rough patch after her high school graduation. The book isn’t a total downer; the jazz scenes crackle with energy and authority, and Jason’s sexy religious zealot landlady generates some chuckles. Coulson moves fluidly between the past and the present, and the novel is ultimately quiet, affecting and redemptive.

 

Set alternately in the jazz clubs and small towns of the Great Lakes region, Coulson’s second novel (after The Vanishing Moon) tells the story of Jason “Coleman” Moore, a moderately successful jazz guitarist who is haunted by memories of his father and grandfather, both avid sailors, and a string of broken relationships. Unable to perform owing to a hand injury, Coleman drinks heavily, fantasizes about his proselytizing landlady, and attempts to salvage his father’s sailboat. The novel is nonlinear in the extreme, with flashbacks inside flashbacks inside flashbacks, and a few chapters are told in the same manner from the point of view of supporting characters. This leads to some confusion for the reader, especially when dream sequences occur that at first appear to be legitimate memories. Nevertheless, the book has a certain flow and rhythm that seems appropriate to its themes, and all loose ends are tied up satisfactorily.

 

In real life, we often go on after trauma and tragedy. In fiction, tragedy sticks to the page, fixed in a character’s personality. Coleman Moore, a jazz guitarist, sits on his boat drinking vodka and contemplating his father’s death, his grandfather’s cruelty and his wife’s estrangement. He thinks about music, his own and his legendary mentor’s. He tries to be who he once was and finds his path blocked by his own mistakes and those of his ancestors. Joseph Coulson’s writing makes a reader hear jazz. There’s a bounce in Moore’s utter failures; he’s held aloft by something we all want a piece of: maybe it’s music, maybe it’s something else.

 

New Poems collects Bill Johnston’s translations of the three most recent volumes by Polish poet Tadeusz Rozewicz. Though never achieving the popularity of his contemporaries Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, and Wislawa Szymborska, Rozewicz is considered a giant of post-war Polish poetry. Rozewicz, now midway through his eigth decade, is still prolific and vital, possessed of a fierce intelligence and acerbic tongue that prompted Milosz to call him “a poet of chaos with a nostalgia for order. Around him and in himself he sees only broken fragments, a senseless rush.” Like Herbert, Rozewicz is a veteran of the Armia Krajowa resistance movement during World War II, and his poems bear witness to his age through the lives of those lost and the objects they leave behind. These stunning new poems, delivered to us by Johston’s deft and modest hand, juxtapose often ruthless interrogations of human cruelty and banality with haunting meditations on memory and loss, as they attempt to address the complexities of present-day human experience under the shadow of the past century.

 

Although his works are published at regular intervals in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, one has to go back over thirty years to find more than a handful of poems last published in the United States by Tadeusz Rózewicz.  No doubt the poet’s somewhat contentious relations with fellow poets, particularly the late Czeslaw Milosz, and his stance as an outsider in his country have both contributed to his remaining on the fringes of who’s who of Polish poetry.  With this pocket-size publication, however, which gathers the poet’s three most recent collections in splendid translation, another of Poland’s greats is at last being reintroduced, albeit without a helpful preface, to American readers.  In fact, New Poems gives us reason to celebrate, not only because a poet whose mastery is indisputable has authored it, but because it may very well deepen our understanding of what Polish poetry is and what it’s been up to lately.

Unlike most established poets in Poland, Rózewicz, who was born in 1921 and lives in Wroclaw, continues to be immensely prolific and embraced by readers old and young alike, including young poets, which in itself is an anomaly, an explanation for which one finds in the poet’s work.  Having fought in the underground army and survived World War II, Rózewicz burst onto the scene writing about the horrors he had witnessed firsthand.  However, what distinguished him from others was his rejection of classical overtones and elaborate forms in favor of verse that was both direct and stripped of any pretentiousness associated with Poland’s traditional labeling of poets as bards and other figures of almost messianic qualities.  Keeping in mind Adorno’s questioning of poetry’s validity after Auschwitz, Rózewicz wrote verse that has become synonymous with the kind of poetry of witness whose sheer poignancy not only battles the reality of wartime horrors but also questions the act of writing itself.

We can be grateful that Tadeusz Rózewicz’s approach and attitude haven’t changed.  He remains a poet of extraordinary intellect, wit, and irony, a poet often writing with a kind of acerbic awareness of what it means to live in this day and age.  His mixture of philosophical and pop-cultural references gives birth to a poetic cocktail that’s hard to turn down, even though his detractors choose to focus on his overt use of irony and sarcasm, calling it nothing short of nihilistic.  The truth—something that Rózewicz seeks more than, say, beauty—however, lies in his desire to scrutinize both past and present without fear of being consumed by either.  This is a lifelong project.  In one of his newer poems, entitled “so what if it’s a dream,” the poet writes, “I write on water // from a few phrases / a few poems / I build an ark,” and the only thing one can say in response is: keep writing, keep building.  New Poems is a necessary book.

-Piotr Florczyk, Wilmington, Delaware

 

In North America, Polish poet and playwright Tadeusz Różewicz’ work is not as well known as that of his contemporaries, Zbigniew Herbert and Nobel Prize-winners  Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska, but in his homeland he is considered  a lion in winter who still has some teeth. Różewicz’ verse is straightforward,  stark and unadorned, an aesthetic he purposely developed after World War Two  when the horror he witnessed drove him to produce a poetry devoid of any frivolity.  If William Carlos Williams had possessed a European sensibility, his work might  have looked like this; a colloquial speaker who wrestles with a 1000 years  of cultural weight. Nearing 90, Różewicz is still active and new poems collects  together the latest three books of this prolific poet’s career, the professor’s knife, gray zone and exit, along with some uncollected recent  works, all published since 2001.

 

Given the  poet’s advanced years, it is not surprising that several poems deal with age.  In “alarm clock,” Różewicz laments that he must write elegies for those he  has outlived, spending too much time with the dead for his liking. Still enamoured  with vigour and vitality, he rebels against the culture of death: “let the  dead bury their dead” because life “is a matter for the living.” He expands  on this theme in “The Gates of Death,” sure enough, an elegy for an old friend.  The gates into the afterlife “are not there” yet “at the same time they are/wide  open to all” regardless of faith or lack thereof. Though the poem begins within  the parameters of Christian theology, it concludes with a reference to the Greek myth of Eurydice. Here she is a Charon, a sparrow, a transporter of souls:

fortunate  are those who die
in  their sleep
their  hand taken
by Eurydice
who is immortal
and weeps for she must
live on alone

In Różewicz’ version, we all look back and leave her but her continuance in  myth, her story told and retold, is a consolation and demonstrates that our  cultural markers can outlive us as transient beings.
And as a  poet, Różewicz is aware of his obligation to language and its role in the perpetuation  of culture. In “why do I write,” he asserts “sometimes ‘life’ conceals/That/which  is greater than life,” suggesting that the ideal is hidden in the mundane circumstances  of our day-to-day existence

so you will not see it
ever
I know
and that is why
I write

because through poetic language a reader can fleetingly glimpse the wondrous  ideal. The nature of the poetic subject is further investigated in “white isn’t  sad…” as poetic language brings the ideal into focus “oh so slowly/it becomes/whiter,”  more than it actually is, perhaps more than it can ever be.

 

Różewicz  is simultaneously aware of both the dangers and limitations of language for  a poet. It may be a bit of a self-serving position, but he notes that the fate  of the poet and the fate of language are linked. When language is degraded,  the poet loses place in a culture. Yet, when a poet gives up on language, he  either falls silent or retreats into the abstract. In “labyrinths,” Różewicz  chastises early 20th century Polish poet Bolesław Leśmian, who

through excess and inattention
[…] became a poet and tumbled
into the labyrinth of God

he sought a way out in language
but language has no way out

Sundered from reality by his excesses in language, Leśmian fades into ineffectuality  and despair until

he waits for the end of the world
the end of history
the end of the end

but the world refuses
to end

In a different poem, Różewicz similarly admonishes Rilke, who chose the linguistic construct of the angel’s tower over the world “so I left him and went to seek/instruction from Brecht.” Furthermore, he probes the boundaries of language itself in “speech conversation dialogue,” a poem about the failure of language to civilize us  as human beings. Though we “have the gift of speech/[that]distinguishes us  from animals” and marks us as sentient creatures, for the most part we use  it to say things like “get the fuck/out of the car” as “cab drivers beat up  a lady/professor from a western university.” The benefit of utterance alone  is insufficient to overcome our inherently brutish nature.

 

Bill Johnston  renders Różewicz’ work into an easily readable English that captures the direct  speech that the poet advocates. If there is a source of frustration with the  book, it is with the woefully inadequate explanatory notes at the end. Różewicz  quotes passages from languages other than his own (German mostly, but also  Japanese, Italian, Latin and Greek), yet no references or translations are  provided and the notes contain only a basic surface gloss. For instance, a  poem like “conversation with Herr Scardanelli” comes with a notation that this  is a pseudonym for German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin but there are no  translations or references to the quotations from his works that Różewicz uses  in the poem. This is not a hindrance to (most of) the poems per se but is nonetheless  grating to the intellectually curious.

 

That aside, new  poems is a fascinating read though perhaps not the best introduction to Różewicz’ work. This book represents the tail-end of a career that began in 1947 and shines with the accumulated wisdom of that amount of experience. Kudos  to Johnston and Archipelago Books for producing this fine volume, a perfect  companion to They Came to See a Poet, Różewicz’ selected poems, published  by Anvil Press in 1991.

 

Christopher Doda is a poet and critic living in Toronto.  His first collection of poems, Among Ruins, was released in 2001  by Mansfield Press and his second, Aesthetics Lesson, appeared in the autumn of 2007.