Like Happiness (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Like Happiness Marianne Kunkel (bio) Michael Hettich . Like Happiness. Anhinga Press. Just as a seesaw is designed to give way to the load on one end and then the other, Michael Hettich's new book of poetry, Like Happiness, is in constant play between the opposing, weighty forces of happiness and its inaccessibility. "Housekeeping," for instance, begins with a pleasant, tranquil scene—an early Sunday morning during which two parents, as one of them describes it, "walk around our house / collecting the turtles and frogs that have slipped in." The speaker continues with "While we gather them we sing," creating a cheery image of the parents cleaning that in a different book might signal sweeter details to come. But Hettich seems capable only of approaching, not dwelling in, happiness, and the difficulty of achieving happiness eventually colors every poem. During the parents' song "mourning doves line up on the gardenia bushes outside" to listen, and the birds' hunger for sweet music prompts the speaker to consider his sleeping children similarly pursuing in their dreams "happiness we haven't ever really known." The author of twelve collections of poetry, Hettich is a Florida-based poet in the imagistic tradition of William Carlos Williams; like Williams, who built images line by line, famously turning a red wheel into a red wheelbarrow, Hettich excels here in deftly nudging cheerful imagery and language into a realm of muted disappointment. He presents human happiness as both an ideal and a near-impossible emotional state, all the while questioning how to separate happiness from poor imitators or, to borrow from the book's title, the "like." Hettich took three years for this book, developing its survey of stages and attitudes about middle age, family life, and matured creativity. The book's three sections and thirty-nine poems gradually shift from an outward [End Page 164] to inward gaze. The first section seems strongest, perhaps because it establishes a powerful point of inquiry—What is behind the human desire to comfort others?—which sections 2 and 3 meaningfully complicate. The book's second poem, "The Teacher," is a coming-of-age poem about two wide-eyed boys who sneak into a school classroom late one afternoon and discover an elderly teacher asleep at her desk. To the shock of the boy speaker, his friend approaches her and is drawn without explanation to stroke her gray hair with the tips of his fingers,as though he were trying to understand somethingor comfort her—until she sat up, startledand blinking, and he whispered it was growing dark outside,and he told her gently it was time to go home. But the teacher puts her head back down and the boys watch her sleep "until the room went dark," finally returning home to their families. Saddened and puzzled, the boys try to reconcile their expectation that the teacher would head home, and thus their embrace of a safe, childish world in which teachers are reliable authorities, with what must be the solitary teacher's desires: emotional relief, a home and family, happiness. Numerous poems in the book's first section reveal individuals, like the teacher, who need comfort, from "The Windfall Fruit" (about a pregnant woman's anxiety over her changing body) to the hilarious and grotesque "Mouse" (in which a just-woken child witnesses a pet cat torture and kill a mouse in his bedroom while his father, oblivious, snoozes next to him). In some poems a comforter, like the speaker's friend in "The Teacher," stands nearby with intentions to help. For example, in "The Moon," which concludes the book's first section, a woman confides in her male partner her frightening, disembodying dreams—that she is a bird that her grandmother finds "in tall grass with a broken wing" or that she is much larger things, such as schools of fish or the tide. To the latter, her partner responds, "But the moon pulls that tide, / . . . Let me be that moon." Hettich ends the poem there, leaving unresolved whether the man's declaration of strength ultimately comforts the woman. Dreams, romance, and out-of-body experiences carry over into the book's second...