Fraser, Gregory. Strange Pietà. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2003. 94 pages.

Poetry is a way for human beings to gain control over the world. That which comes about naturally—love and time, light and birth—proves terrifying to us, posed as the most powerful beings, yet utterly powerless over all but the “cheap details” of life (part 9 of “Strange Pietà”). In his debut book Strange Pietà, the poetry of Gregory Fraser reflects the attempt all humans make to predict the world of chance and understand the realm of fate with the greatest tools we have—language, logic, and imagination—and reveals them as unable to prove much more than that often, cold hard facts sit like stones encircling the dimming embers of hope.

“Poems must reflect that light,” Fraser reminds us in the opening poem, “Ars Poetica,” despite the inartistic truths that douse us like cold water. The poet’s ear is golden, internal rhymes singing both paeans and pain, calling forth images of his brother stricken with spina bifada—Jonathon, the muse for many of the poems in this book. “All poetry begins, from now on, with my brother’s legs,” says Fraser, reassessing poetry’s ability to shed much light at all on our world, to redeem that which seems to be so damned. “Goodbye to light of the highest power, goodbye. / … / Our God is far away” the poet writes, content to “call God ‘cause’ and be done” with his irritable reaching after fact and reason for a gestation gone haywire. “Hush the mating calls of rhyme” he intones; “Suppose / we make verse blank, to match my brother’s eyes,” his poems’ deft enjambment often leaving the next line’s possibilities as open as Jonathon’s hapless malformed spine. This opening poem tells us “what's required: [to] snuff the light of passion” and admit the truth we need to know: “the world’s an ugly baby we must love.”

The verities of family play a crucial role in Strange Pietà. In “Work,” when Fraser summons his father’s ghost for a final bonding with his eldest son at the “rock garden [he] helped him plant when they were kids,” he recalls the calloused “hands of justice” that never once fell on him. The following poem recounts his father’s angry sublimation when these same hands make “sharp smacks…ringing the air” as, drowning his rage, the old man dives after a pocket watch carelessly dropped by the author into a fishing hole (“Losing Father’s Pocketwatch”). Of course, as many of these fine poems record, lost time can never be retrieved.

But it’s that desperate sense of hope that keeps us kicking, holding our breath for the sake of our own family members, as well as our friends, neighbors, and ultimately ourselves. Fraser addresses the human condition, how we are each and all bound in suffering in the poems “Coward” and “A Friend’s Divorce.” The former begins, “There’s a coward in every eavesdropper,” as the poet persona overhears his neighbor receive a regular beating from her blue-collar husband. Despite the emotional connection to the violence between the couple, he deliberates whether to cross the boundary and try to make a difference if he can, knowing “that doing nothing / is always doing something, and that nothing in this case / was something hurtful.” The proper connection between himself and the couple and the authorities can be made if he just calls the police, but he instead sets “the receiver back / undialed, telling the better part of [himself]” to mind his own business. The speaker’s hope for the better is foiled by his own inaction, and when he sees the battered woman the next day, the speaker realizes that they have much in common, that “of all the things / he’d beaten out of her / it was hope that things might change that hurt the worst.”

“A Friend’s Divorce” approaches a similar connection between the speaker and another troubled couple. The decision to separate comes “like a lightning bolt, [having] split the house straight down the center” as though it were fated from above and not a decision made freely here on earth. Seated with a girlfriend, the poet pretends to understand the dynamics, but is merely trying to keep the connection alive between himself and his friend. Watching two dinner candles “sway like two lovers […] at the end of a wedding reception,” he realizes that eventually, all fires die out.

But hope is rekindled in “Lemon,” wherein we return to the telephone as a symbol for human connection. The poet recounts that “for months” he’d been “crying out without crying out, like a disconnected / phone in a vacant apartment,” the formal line break speaking in volume loud as the content. The question of freedom or fate desperately resolved when the speaker concludes “we are little more than footnotes placed by stars […], that whatever sense / of a timeless home me might possess was quaint homage.” Then, as sudden as the lightning bolt that split his dear friend’s house, “a brilliant, unbruised lemon roll[ed] past [his] feet like a drop of sun, fiery salver.” The poet logically concludes that the lemon “must have fallen off the sidewalk display / of the fruit stand on the corner,” though his logic falls short of revealing an earthly truth since “no fruit stand stood anywhere in sight.” This sign, this symbol of golden hope, is enough to bring hope back to the poet, chanting “I’d been crying out without crying out for months, / then my mouth exploded with lemon, lemon… .”

Still exploring his desire for some hint of a higher power, the faintest glimmer a possibility for grace, Fraser intertwines the numerous thematic strands of his book, securing them in the final and title poem, “Strange Pietà,” just as his mother “weaves her granddaughter into braids” with much the same motion she once used praying “the rosary that lapsed from her hands / decades back” (section 2). This ten-section poem presents a Fourth of July picnic and fireworks display attended by the speaker’s family, an event wherein the members must all face the fact of Jonathon’s crippling disease. Fraser’s limber and musical language, deft line control, and keen awareness of his medium rise to a crescendo in this final piece. Lines such as “when he sheds the limits of his legs that are their fetters, / arms that cannot …/ yank themselves free from irregular sleeves, hands / that won’t mend engines, glide ivory or lettered keys” demand to be read aloud (section 1). Section six steps back from the lyric narrative when the poet becomes critic, addressing our ability to revise and refine verse to perfection, while the world it reflects remains far from imperfect. He admits that “details, like beads have been added” to carry the poem from accurate record to art, and proves his connection to the reader by asking us to decide whether they’re “plastic” or “pearl.” A string of beads and his flat statement that opens this section—“let’s get one thing / straight: what precedes and follows is nothing / of the kind”—hearken back to the central problem of the verse to be resolved—his brother’s twisted spine.

That the speaker should be able to climb a ladder to look for birds’ eggs in rafters, that his brother positioned “one rung up” in the family (section 7) and he can “stand on the threshold of bulb light” at his parents’ bedroom door to witness the “strange pieta” of his father tending to his heartbroken mother after the birth of their last son (section 3), the poet chalks up to dumb luck, knowing heredity to be the ultimate game of chance. The poet’s “other Father” (section 3) is imagined as careless with our fragile destinies when Fraser writes of “His great, blundering / hands opening the precious book of [his] brother’s life / and cracking the spine” (section 8). The importance of family ties and personal connections play out themselves in umbilical references again to the telephone by which his father tells callers about the birth of their son, the “ocular leash” his overprotective mother kept them on after the realization of what can happen to our children through no fault of our own, the “spider’s thread” on which the remaining time of this particular summer hung on Independence Day (section 8), and especially the image of the rosary, like the faith itself both she and the poet find difficult to hold any longer. Those symbolic beads, like the individual poems of Strange Pietà, the sections of its closing poem, the lines and words right down to “the smallest semes” (section 5) of this book all lead straight to the broken body of Jonathon. Fraser provides a testament in this book to our common fears, our desperate efforts to maintain faith in “some resplendent fire” (section 8), and the need for a quiet acceptance of those fateful things we cannot hope change. The “sweet luck” of life (section 7), the speaker contends in the final line of section 8, is a necessary part of existence: “We must learn to cherish chance to have one.”