BOOK REVIEW
David Raffeld's world of men
INTO THE WORLD OF MEN. By David Raffeld. Adastra Press. 46 pages. $10.
by Seth Rogovoy(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., April 6, 1997) -- In his new collection of poems, "Into the World of Men," Williamstown poet David Raffeld has sculpted muscular images out of the raw material of an American life. With a particular emphasis on childhood and adolescence, Raffeld mines the dark, quiet corners of existence -- moments whose lasting import is impossible to dismiss, but nevertheless moments that ordinarily pass by unnoticed save for the subjective consciousness. In his earthy poems of just a page or two, Raffeld rescues these moments -- the first day on a job, going shopping, a childhood play-date -- from oblivion, and via finely etched, vivid narratives, describes luminous moments of transcendence.
Brimming with the secret drama of everyday life and coarse, brick-like language ("carbon chips that burst/into black snakes lit on city concrete/that turned into ash on the Fourth"), Raffeld's poems, with their allusions to Jewish life in Chicago in the 1950s and '60s, can be read as minimalist versions of Saul Bellow's monumental works that celebrate and castigate similar terrain. Distilling their essence into a few lines, however, they are no less powerful than Bellow's novels in their tender evocation and brutal realism.
The title poem, "Into the World of Men," vividly describes the seminal experience of an adolescent boy being suddenly cast into the intimidating company of adult males. At age 15, lunch box in hand, the narrator takes a pre-dawn train ride to the place where he will join a drywall crew. We are clued in from the very beginning, however, that even with the boy's connection "to an Uncle with clout/in the gargoyled world of graft/in the city of How Things Get Done," he is an outsider among the illegal aliens and "Herculean rednecks" he works alongside: his lunch box hides a book of Dostoevsky short stories, "buried in the bottom dark."
Raffeld's poems are particularly rich with narrative and sensory detail. Note how in this excerpt from "Chicken Soup" the images of the [9]peyot[7] of the religious Jews merge with the very streets and trees of their neighborhood: "...we had to be home before Friday sundown was why my grandmother/drove 75 in a 30 zone from the southeast/to the northwest side of Chicago/to get our three kosher chickens./We drove through the long bearded streets,/weeping willow vines that were only a little longer/than the sideburns of the Hasids we passed/hurrying in preparation for the Sabbath." The conflation of the beards of the Jews with the landscape itself -- "the long bearded streets" -- makes memory, already a dream or act of the unconsciousness, even more dream-like.
Another poem, "Spanky's," recalls a juvenile trip to a brothel across state lines, where "the little white boy souls of South Chicago/...gave away their money and spilled their seed." The poem "Nirvana" immortalizes a youthful friendship with a retarded boy, a devoted companion whom the narrator blesses "for the audience he gave me/I would never have again."
These memory-poems, with their tender and ambivalent recollections of youth, are juxtaposed with works of imagination such as "Listen," a raw, stark look at life -- such as it was -- in a Nazi death camp, where the inmates are literally "breathing the ash of their families." Other signposts of the era, including the Cold War and Vietnam, are also touched on, in "Red Is Dead, Warhol, Too" and "Tea Ceremony," respectively, providing context for the more autobiographical poems.
The last third of the volume features selections from "The Isaac Oratorio," a verse play based on the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, in which we hear from Sarah, Hagar, Isaac and a very contemporary-sounding omniscient narrator. Raffeld has invested the characters with human and poetic qualities that transcend the gulf of time. "Are not the demands on this life enough without this higher calling?" demands Sarah of her husband, Abraham, sounding like a bit of a martyr and a bit of a nudge.
The book itself is a rare work of art. The limited edition run of 300 copies -- 26 of which are cloth, signed and lettered A-Z by the author - was printed letterpress from hand-set antique type, then hand-sewn. The cover illustration is an assemblage by Julio Granda, of the town of Washington. It is a loving, worthy vessel for the resonant contents within.
David Raffeld will read from "Into the World of Men" in Smith House at North Adams State College on Wednesday, April 9, at 7:30 pm.
[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on April 6, 1997. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1997. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
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