Wonderland by Matthew Dickman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Wonderland by Matthew Dickman Chris Ketchum (bio) Matthew Dickman. Wonderland. W. W. Norton. From the first pages of Matthew Dickman’s Wonderland, boys are desperate to become men. Dickman’s third full-length collection of poems transports us again to his Portland, Oregon, neighborhood of the 1980s, demonstrating how the cruelties and complicities of the past manifest in the present day. The landscape is Catholic school and chain-link fence, syringe and stolen cigarette, mini-mart and skate park, but among the images of dereliction, Dickman finds the rain, a pine tree that reminds him of Saint Francis, and “the blue heron that lives / in Laurelhurst Park.” As he explores the characters of his childhood, Dickman neither indicts nor apologizes for the adults or children in his poems; he looks on them with compassion for their complexities, offering measured appraisals of their choices and actions. Wonderland quiets the exuberance of Dickman’s earlier work to a reflection on the people and circumstances that defined his life before adulthood. Many poems in Mayakovsky’s Revolver, his second book, examine friends, lovers, and family members with the intention of turning the lens around; the narrator triangulates the self through his relationships. By contrast, Wonderland places two cameras on the same scene: one held by the narrator, who tells us the story as he witnesses it, and a second held by Dickman, but farther back, showing the edges of a greater sociopolitical context connected to the stories of his youth, and implicating himself as a bystander. “Gas Station,” from Mayakovsky’s Revolver, reads as our beacon toward the subjects developed in Wonderland, touching on accountability and guilt when the narrator explains that “Anton and I had cornered a younger kid . . . [and] screamed at him / Say you’re fat! Say it.” This refined wide-angle shot also allows Dickman to focus outward, yielding several [End Page 186] powerful, loving poems about his mother and their relationship. Paradoxically, his new scope offers us the books’ most honest moments of introspection. Wonderland’s first poem, “Teenage Riot,” gives insight into Dickman’s thematic and formal interests that pervade the collection. The poem introduces us to a group of boys on the cusp of high school, learning new skate tricks, “flipping off cops and skinheads,” drinking their parents’ vodka, and, like many of us who were once boys, believing they can misbehave their way into manhood. When the narrator’s friend suddenly gets jumped, another boy “walked / over to the man / like someone walking into a bank / and stabbed him.” Dickman is a hypnotist, lulling the reader into identifying with his characters through nostalgia or his own acute sense of empathy, until violence or heartbreak snaps us back to reality. It is his extraordinary control of tone, consistent and understated, that allows Dickman to deliver such a swift volta without it feeling cheap or lurid, leaving us, like the victim of the stabbing, “right in the middle of his new consciousness, / kind of looking around.” One of the most exciting structural features of Wonderland is how Dickman couples a narrative, or theme, with its own form that tracks throughout the book. The five titular poems, all called “Wonderland,” follow a character named Caleb from the fourth grade through his assimilation of white supremacy. Each poem is written in couplets, which adopts the stop-motion effect of flipping through a stack of snapshots. In the first poem, we see Caleb tossing a stick, which he imagines as a flaming sword, in his front yard, while “Inside the house / his dad is screaming at his mom.” The intervening poems detail a litany of misguided choices and intensifying cruelties, until the culminating poem of the series, in which “Caleb is marching / with his new friends, their shaved heads / like tongues of fire.” It is as if Dickman is leading us back to the first “Wonderland” to find where it all went wrong; when did the flaming stick become a torch? What prevents Wonderland from coming off as even remotely sanctimonious are the annals of complicity in violent or prejudicial behavior throughout the book, part and parcel with Dickman’s willingness to situate his narrator beside deeply flawed individuals...