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A Parade of Hands
James Hoch
61 pg. $12.95
Silverfish Review Press, 2003
Reading around in various literary journals the past few years, James Hoch's poetry immediately caught my eye. Already his work shows a skill that is easy to envy. On one hand, his poems show the ghost of metrics and, no doubt, he is informed by certain formalists, among them, I suspect, David Baker and one of his former teachers, Stanley Plumly. On the other, they are also memorably about something: the self's confrontations with the world. Specifically, in A Parade of Hands, Hoch faces down his demons time and again via the unconscious workings of memory. In this choice, one can see the influence of Rodney Jones' poetry on what is Hoch's rather precocious first collection. In fact, some of Hoch's titles show Jones' direct influence. Hoch's "Other Shoe Time," for instance, recalls Jones' poem "Raccoon Time," and in both title and sense of line "Gleaners" is reminiscent of one of Jones' finest poems, "Weepers" from Transparent Gestures (1989).
The title poem begins by imagining a "pack" of Italian boys huddled over a heron sunk in mud, not sure if it is alive or dead, though quickly, within the space it takes to read the next line, they assume it is dead and prod it with a stick and then slit open its neck. Here, once looking "inside" the heron, the poet imagines what he sees is not merely flesh, but a kind of beauty that he compares to "snips of rhododendron" and laurel, then, interestingly, to "a small orange carp plucked from the shallows," and, finally, to a "placenta from snake eggs." You can clearly see where Hoch is taking himself, and us, just from this fresh act of description, a poem that refuses to flinch from human cruelty, that wants to not only witness it, but, if possible, transform it, as he does through the quiet music of his muscular lines. In his poem "Shed," which I quote in full, Hoch imagines a scene from a friend's childhood:
The night you were collecting fireflies
with an empty jar, the house shaking
apart with yelling, your brother calling,
sent out like a hound to haul you back,
you ran into the shed, where you could
lose a finger or eye on a push mower,
pruning shears, the sickle your mother
used to edge the lawn, the shape a word
for moon and cell, longing and sickness.
You took it down, wielded the sickle,
flickering in the shadow of an eve,
imagining yourself murderous, feared,
mastering air curling behind blade,
and wanted to take off your clothes,
stand naked like a criminal, your name
hollered over the lawn, a handful of
winged insects throbbing against glass.
The poem is striking in terms of how masterfully Hoch describes the scene, from the rather ludicrous image of the brother "sent out like a hound to haul you back," to such insightful details as when the friend picks up the sickle and imagines himself "murderous" to, finally, the abstractions Hoch creates from the word sickle, "the shape a word/ for moon and cell, longing and sickness." These abstractions Hoch creates, quite literally, stand at the center of this strong first collection. It is such "longing and sickness" that Hoch desires to remedy.
In much of this book, the source of that sickness are fathers, like his own who, the poet remembers, put a hand on his head in the shower and made him feel belonged, yet with the same hand took him behind the shed and "split him like a log," as Hoch describes in a prose poem entitled "Squash." Such family violence is not Hoch's alone. A part of the complexity of "Squash" is how the speaker moves from his self-described "spoiled boy's story" to his wife's story about her father, "who slept on the couch, too drunk to make it to his wife, the sound of him rising from the couch, the booze smell starting up the stairs, and the weight like a beam falling into a crowd." The book spreads out like this, away from the given traumas of childhood toward acts of communal sharing and momentary grace.
- Billy Reynolds
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