from The
Florida Review
Reviewed by
Janelle Aslin, University
of Central Florida
"This is what the world needs! A
key."
Michael David Madonick declares this in his
poem "The Sardine Can," and his first collection may be viewed
precisely as that: the key. His poems focus on what matters to all of us: life
and death, parenting and childhood, marriage, faith, and responsibility both
personal and societal. It is a collection of isolated moments, studied and
crafted, and presented subtly for the reader by an accessible voice.
In his first poem, "Waking The Deaf
Dog," from which the whole derives its title, Madonick opens a discourse
by asking the question: "how does one move a deaf dog who bites?"
And this collection seems to be his answer.
Early in the collection Madonick establishes
his authorial position in "Point Of Entry": "I don’t know
what I want / to hear. If, in fact, there’s anything to be told. But / I
often stand out in the breeze, medial, / expecting anything, even luck."
In this way, by his lingering in the moment, Madonick sees what we often miss,
hears what we are all too often deaf to.
Poem after poem is an intelligent and open
documentation of his version of our lives. He takes us from the darkest
moments to the most glorious ones. In "Today," we are brought to the
moment of death, of the realization of death forced into our own landscape:
In your pocket a knife
is dulling in its rose-
wood case, and your wife
is calling you from the
kitchen, there’s a phone
call, and how do you want
your eggs. Sunny-side up
comes to mind and you pick
up what you think is the
phone and your mother tells
you your father died in his
sleep last night. The paper
drops from your hand, opens
to the weather map, your kids
jump down the stairs. They
giggle at a cartoon on the
TV, ignoring the meteorological
hieroglyphs, the low and high
pressure systems battling it
out on the surface of the page.
But Madonick brings us back again to the same moment from
another lingering viewpoint in "The Promise":
…Just yesterday,
a plane flying from Kanpur to Katmandu crashed
into the side of a mountain, the pilot repeating,
"I see the airport, I see the lights. We’re
coming in." You say, "It wasn’t there." I say,
he saw it. I say, he saw an airport that wasn’t
built yet and birds are flying into promises. I
know it’s hard to believe. We all hit something.
I’ve been told, this is the dark room
we practice being blind in.
The collection does provide a range,
shifting from the comic to the serious, the dark to the light and the natural
world to the human world. Madonick may focus on the small, as in "The
Wing," a short seven line poem that details the wing in precise and rich
imagery, "If that wing / were a hand and that hand were the hand of a nun
/ and he could see the dart of that dark-headed jay’s / China-blue feathers
slur through the wood." But he also has the ability to venture out, as
seen in a remarkably fresh and longer poem, "The Hiding," which
finds its creation in his father’s reading of Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and
Ham, a style which is mimicked seductively by Madonick throughout the
poem. And just like Dr. Seuss’ works, there is a vital meaning beneath all
of the play:
She is a child, my mother,
she is a child painting a clown’s face
white. With her red lipstick, with her mascara,
with her wall over a wall, she is at war
I think. My mother, there is a war
in her, there is a war
in my mother that she is pointing
her face for.
I am even inclined to recommend buying a
copy of this collection just to experience this poem in all its originality
and poignant detail.
Madonick has sectioned the collection into
three parts, and the poems I have focused on all come from the first and third
sections. If the collection slips, it is in the second section, but this is
only in isolated instances rather than a failure of the whole. What breaks
down is the clarity, and only because everywhere else the speaker and the
imagery is so concise and rich, to the point that these moments jump off the
page. In "The Pirate Map," for instance, besides having the tone of
an inside joke that the reader is not privy to, we are given a comparison of
images, one of "a rabbi dovening" to be seen like "dachshunds
next to the Kleenex box people put on the shelves in the back of their
cars." And I am left not knowing what to do with these images that are
possibly inaccessible to readers either separately or as a whole.
This phenomenon of distancing the reader
does not happen often and seems to be isolated to the second section, a common
thread in any poet’s collection, hiding the weakest ones in the middle. But
what is weak for Madonick still possesses an incredible strength and grace,
and this second section also displays his incredible wit or comic seriousness
in beautiful poems such as "Bull" and "Gravity" and
"Friedman’s Last Straw."
Ultimately, Waking The Deaf Dog is a
powerful and intelligent collection that is rich in imagination and range.
"You should know this. You / should know this about yourself"
Madonick writes in the final poem, "Dog." He reminds us that
"we will all turn dog, nose to tail, nose / to tail, the ear finally
rested / by the heart." But before that, Michael David Madonick may
succeed in waking the deaf dog in all of us.
Read about Michael David Madonick |
Waking the Deaf Dog
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