Jan '03 [Home]

Review

3 Schools, 34 Churches:  We Tied Off for Pentecost

Paul McDonald's Like Neon
poems and belief systems

(Wasteland Press, 2001
Louisville, KY, 75 pp. $12)



. . .

Some of the poems in this collection are well-conceived, some are well-executed; both successes reside in a few.

Paul McDonald is a college town Alabama-bred and -educated writer/singer transplanted to urban Kentucky. His voice here is most authoritative when he speaks from the integrity of that fundamentalist, good sense—if hermetically wrong-headed—belief system, as in the title poem.

We talked about The Rapture
Like it was insider information
Those of us in the loop
Would rise into the air
Kick back
And watch the Great Tribulation
Like it was Monday Night Football

The straight declarative offers subtext, some of it embedded in an authentic, though inaudible, accent. Irony follows solidly, served up in an elegant, because ingenuous, idiom.

Jesus was a drug
We would tie off
for Pentecost
We were chosen
To ascend to God's Right Hand
And have His Revenge

Described in the author profile as an avid devotee of Siddha Yoga, it is evident that McDonald renounced "Thank God, I'm a country boy" as all-purpose mantra early into his freshman World Philosophies course, and thereafter opened his mind wide to alternative interpretation.

One day I read a Parallel Bible
Four translations
Column by column
First Corinthians
Chapter Thirteen

"If I have prophetic powers…"
"I may have the power of prophecy…"
"And comprehend all mysteries…"
"The knowledge of every hidden truth…"

Only too familiar with the loveless sound and fury signifying the hypocrite, if he soon deviated onto a new, broader path toward relative enlightenment, that path, for him, was illumined by language.

The words glowing and humming
Like neon tongues
Leaping off the page

Whatever a writer's linguistic course, words affect a reader most when they seem self-selected, seem to fall of their own accord into the phrase inevitable, as the French say, to the exclusion of all others ("we tied off for Pentecost"). 'Seem' is key. In fact, we mostly have to work for that artlessness. McDonald often achieves it, but could invite it more consistently, going deeper or, in Roy Blount, Jr.'s phrase, "gnashing on some oak tree roots!" In Crackers, the Georgian humorist lets us listen in to the inner voice that hounds him to perfection:

Boy! Anybody can snuffle along through the pine straw! I want to see you down with your teeth in the dirt! Reaching and gnawing and chewing and gnashing on some oak tree roots! Right on down through to where the juice is. Git it. Drive. Show me something!  .  .  . Just look at that. You proud of that sentence? You want your son or daughter to trustingly come upon that sorry-ass sentence someday .  .  . and have to say my daddy wrote that? My daddy wrote that pore shitty sentence sitting there with no more grain nor solace in it than a old damn half-cooked canned sleazy puffy-ass artificial god damn depressing-looking so-called biscuit? Hunh? Hunh?

McDonald has an ear for cadence. Formal musical training has no doubt reinforced both that and his gift for phrase, the artlessly inevitable. But phrase requires context and counterpoint, because, while language is the sequence of telling, consciousness is the order of it. McDonald succeeds least when he borrows on the shopworn ideas of false peers:  technological solitude, man's inhumanity to man (including bad dates), and poetic precursors.

the eye for an eye mentality
that pervades and desecrates
a holy place spreads howling and shrieking
like an airborne virus in the center of a vortex

("Millennium Prayer")

Does death really exist, Allen?
("Father Ginsberg")

Commentary for lines like these sounds about right borrowed from the voice that torments Blount:

You fraid you going to have say something hard. You fraid you not going to be able to say something hard.  .  . . Whud I tell you, boy? You can't suck no blood from a dead squirrel.

McDonald can do hard and do it subtle—and funny. He is a better poet than those he believes to be his peers. No need to adopt any from Tompkins Square or Central Park, he's got some very lively squirrels in his attic.

Back then we learned right from wrong
And how to thin the herd
Every one of us
Attended the First Church
Of the Holy Sidewinder Diamondback
To make damn sure we got it right
Or we got it over with
("Compassionistic Conservitism")

McDonald's credits include Bulldog Breath and Cosmik Debris. Mega-vernacular titles such as these typically mark repositories of flat, uncrafted writing and prosaic ideas which no amount of swearing or shock value sex can redeem. His guts deserve better.

i did the best
the worst
and the most blatantly mediocre i could
so here it is, god
get it out of my sight
take every bloody corpuscle
and call me when you're done
("Recovery Blues")

Beneath the leaf cover of self-deprecating humor lies a hard nut of objective awe which Paul McDonald has been storing up for several seasons. Distinctive work in this book hints that the next one should produce the oak.

—MH