The Ladder by Alan Michael Parker

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Ladder by Alan Michael Parker Leah Miranda Hughes Alan Michael Parker. The Ladder. Tupelo Press, 2016. Some literary voices hit a tone that can be identified by only a few words, like playing “Name That Tune” with just a few lines, and Alan Michael Parker projects one of those voices. From his distinctive gang of Vandals to sundry romances to verbal calculations, the poet manages a smart and frank philosophical voice throughout eight collections of poems. The Ladder, named the best book of 2016 in North Carolina with the NC Poetry Society’s notable Brock-Campbell Award, sounds as true to Parker as ever from the first note. The Ladder begins with the perfect epigraph, lines from Puccini’s poet Rudolfo in La Boheme: “What do I do? I write. And how do I live? I live.” A reader might view Parker’s collection with the opera in mind: a poor but happy, artistic life, the poet’s lover romantically dying in his arms, proving that art and love fill living with value. Parker begins the collection gathering the leaves of “this life the next life,” settling in to “Give a Little Talk on Singing.” This poem reveals a narrative philosophy that Parker and Puccini’s Rudolfo obviously share, for the poet, to write is to live. Illustrative of the struggle inherent in living (not to mention creating art), Parker’s narrator sings only begrudgingly. With a dry, discontented humor, the poems scan the horizon from offering prayers for daily living to making demands of God. What is enough? What to remember? What wishes to make? The collection gestures towards a potential reset at a midpoint as opposed to a midlife crisis. In the middle years of his life, the narrator of the title poem gets a grass sack “to start [a] new life.” Parker would use the ladder contained in his grass sack to “climb down from ambition.” Does the reader suppose that the speaker indicates a realization or expectation: To not expect so much? To descend from some height reached? To negotiate the expected anticlimax of a plot diagram in any given narrative? The Old Testament tells the story of Jacob’s Ladder: as Jacob flees for his life, his murderous brother Esau close on his heels, he dreams of a ladder that angels ascend and descend with God standing alongside. It is the gate to heaven. An old spiritual memorializes the story, one still sung as a hymn in the South today to remind the choir and congregation that “we are climbing…higher higher” everyday. In fact, Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie further popularized the song in folk music, bringing the Old Testament tale to a celebration of the steady daily human struggle of living in this world. [End Page 50] Through hair, X-rays, the moon, hotel rooms, and postcards, Alan Michael Parker also celebrates a person’s daily wrestling with life. With a keen eye on some inevitable end, the poems convey a sense of hope and home from the self-professed curmudgeonly singer. Parker brings clever diction and even more witty parallels, observations, and speculations to pull the extraordinary out of the ordinary. In each volume, Parker has an emotive house pet representing domestic love. In this collection, the dog misses “you,” an infamous use of second person, so much that he learns regretful, wistful, simple and sincere phrases in a multitude of foreign languages. These dogs and cats often extend gracious compassion, fetching the reader a heartbreaking moonful of amour or affection. Alan Michael Parker’s collection The Ladder keeps alive his distinctive voice over time. The poems convey honest statements with humor, yet, deepen in sincerity, with pretense or bluff stripped away for the reader to sit at the center of experiences such as burying a relative, going through the airport, taking a swim, turning 50. To illustrate, one of Parker’s speakers would steal a work of art, a Matisse representing hope, but not burn it to cover up the crime. Another speaker will ponder the eternal to come at peace with the ephemeral nature of a full head of hair. Such vulnerable honesty creates heartbreakingly beautiful poems...