Poems & Stories by Richard Blessing

Abstract

Reviews Poems & Stories. By Richard Blessing. (Port Townsend, WA: Dragon Gate, Inc., 1983. 75 pages, paper $6.00; cloth $14.00.) In his earlier books, Richard Blessing announced himself a writer we should all know. But now there is no doubt that he is a writer whom we must know. Critic, novelist, short story writer, poet, he has found a style and a subject matter which count. For Blessing is an artist of endings, of loss, of nostalgia, and he speaks elegiacally to all of us, of himself and of ourselves. His is a true, not a sentimental, nostalgia, the dark nostalgia for our childhood, our loves, our lives, our selves, all that which we once had and no longer have or, perhaps, will have only for a short time. And yet this book ends, not with lament, but with courage, a celebration of art, of body, and of love. In itself it is a unity, made out of alternating sections of prose fictions and poetry, and giving us a kind of “life,” a biog­ raphy, for there is a central persona, appearing in several guises, and growing from childhood to middle age and terrible illness. To describe the book may give some sense of its depth. The opening section is three short fictions, essentially initiation stories, initiations into the knowledges that childhood must end, that families end, that love ends (indeed, in all the prose, sexual jealousy is a powerful motif). The first fiction begins with a boy talking with his uncle (and, told dramatic­ ally, the story reveals emotion only through action). There is a rough sort of family love here. But the story surprises with an ironic-comic act of violence: the uncle knocks down an acquaintance of whom he may be jealous. The boy is sickened. Yet the uncle, calling the boy to supper, says, “Ya gotta eat if you’re gonna grow to a man.” The second story is a brief, almost objective, glimpse of a family’s decision to put an aging grandmother into an “old folks’ home” ; and, with the third, in which an older husband kills his wife, brings the boy into an early adulthood and to an awareness of the terribleness of the adult, masculine world. The first two poems of the second section are irrelevant to the implied “life,” but they function as further images of our American society, violent, discontinuous, masculine. But the next two poems give us the protagonist as adult, with an aging, dying father; and the fifth, last one, is a kind of wry love poem: the lovers watch breeding salmon drive upwards to their deaths, and the poem ends with “It is our only life.” The third section is again three prose fictions, on divorce, on the child of the marriage, on the protagonist’s attempt to recapture his past for the child’s 138 Western American Literature sake and for his own sake — and it is only the child who can say, at a baseball game, “I’m glad we came.” The last story here, “Song on Royal Street,” is not only on the ambiguity of memory, on what really happened in the marriage, but on the ambiguity of “family.” The divorced wife, having the last word, says of their child, “He isn’t even yours.” And truly the boy isn’t the man’s child, not now. The seven final poems are deeply moving both in subject matter and in the expression of that matter, an expression most serious and yet often playful, punning, a defense against pain. The speaker is ill, and it is his life that he holds to, turns over, loves and hates. In “Subtraction,” the voice says, “To reduce generalization, think of yourself as minuend. / The result is negative.” Or, speaking of the first onslaught of his illness, he stands, after hospital and pain, on the basketball court and says, “This is the court where the verdict came down, / a lawful seizure, a sentence like a blow to the head.” And in the last lines of the last poem, “Homecoming,” hand in hand with his lover, he looks out the window: “After the scanning, CAT scan and radium, the...