Robert Hill // Reviews

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Poppy: Austin Hummell

Hummell, Austin. Poppy. Washington, DC: Del Sol, 2004. 80 pp.

If Austin Hummell’s first book, The Fugitive Kind, sounds like Elgar—pressurized and classical— Poppy suggests the radical suspensions and reluctant resolutions of Bartók or Dvořák. This latest book reveals not only fresh tonalities but also new subject matter, in particular, hard drugs.

With “God’s Early Church,” the poet reaches out with large hands in the resonant first line of the book, then clinches that first stanza with a companionable “You” to pre-empt our dismissal of his drug-laced persona as some weird Other:

Whole months pass without sun. February
all coffee and the stink of iron. Once,
a girl from Carolina left me
for dead. Something about ambition
and the ropy vein in the bend of my arm.
I lanced them both with flowers from another
country. You should have seen it.

Of course, “You should have” also divides those who know from those who don’t. The euphoria is disturbingly seductive, especially in “Heroin”; but unlike, say, Coleridge, Hummell painfully interrogates his own startling representation of the drug’s exquisite, deliberate processes. The user both desires and fears the thin-to-crumbling edge of life:

Plunge is some of it, the taste of blood
sublingual. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
You want both the armor of junk
and your heart to beat beneath.

In the end, the poet re-enters the world; or, more accurately, he sees that he never left it. Exhausted and temporarily regretful, he returns to “heart,” not only for metaphor but also as a stark reminder of that organ’s physical susceptibility to potent drugs (let’s recall Uma Thurman’s needle-in-the-heart resuscitation scene in Pulp Fiction):

In each dream there are friends to ditch,
family to rob, women to make wait and betray
as waking turns on you—when the dream, dope,
the flu in your body and every poem you write
to kill it, withdraws. When shaking and awake
you beg for the laurel’s cloak
and your heart to slow beneath.

Whatever his subject matter, Hummell composes poetic music, as in “The Hand of Beatrice,” when he takes the risk of closing a vernacular-sounding sentence with “dirndl”:

All that moss and gothic gasping,
she can’t help it if she pushes the O
out of her mouth like it’s a dirndl.

After that happy surprise, he pivots a half-line on three easy words to disrupt idiom and signal transcendence. He does not say “he can’t help” the mundane “it”; he says “everything,” ecstatically flinging a second direct object, “his arms”:

                                                        As for him,
he can’t help everything and his arms
if they fly from their sides when he sees her
and reaches for the tenth of ten heavens.

With transcendent waking-shaking-moss, we may sense Roethke as a precursor, but Hummell crafts his own headlong syntax whose music most of us cannot make but can gratefully hear a real poet perform in our behalf.

~ Robert Hill

Date of Publication: 20 May 2007