Kevin Prufer, The Fears
I keep returning to theimage of a kitten
asleep in the engine
As a way of understanding
the history of mycountry.
So warm under the car’shood,
the hidden sweetness inthe dark machinery.
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Start the car.
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[The sound the kittenmakes.]
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Happy slaves on a lazyafternoon
sleeping in the shadow ofhay bales.
A banjo lying in the sun.
Stolen apples.
A lithograph on the wallin my father’s office:
The sweet ol’ summahtime.(“Automotive”)
I’mcurrently working my way through American poet Kevin Prufer’s ninth poetrycollection (and the first I’ve seen of his), The Fears (Port TownsendWA: Copper Canyon Press, 2023), following titles such as National Anthem(2008), In a Beautiful Country (2011), Churches (2014), How He Loved Them (2018) and The Art of Fiction (2021). There’s ameandering sharpness to these pieces, a movement that is incredibly precise,reminiscent of the late Toronto poet David Donnell for a kind of conversational tone that moves and sways andcoheres in ways that are almost startling (although the language feels moreexact than Donnell). I see this comparison most obvious in the rhythms of poemssuch as “W.H. Auden’s ‘The Fall of Rome’,” that opens with a pacing and aconversational kind of ease entirely comparable with Donnell’s catalogue:
In the final lines of hisgreat poem “The Fall of Rome,”
Auden describes
not the facts
of the late Empire’s fall,
but distant herds of reindeer
moving quickly and silently
across vast expanses of goldenmoss.
We don’t know
where those herds are,
only that theyseem impossibly
far from the troubles ofmen,
not mindless but
beyond mind,
uncountable, twilit, inhuman,
unconcerned with the failuresof empires.
Prufer’spoems begin with a moment, and then work to articulate every angle of it, unableto move beyond until every particle is properly considered. “He had becomefascinated by the way / excellent poems sometimes failed to hold together,” Prufer’stitle poem begins, “in ways he expected them to. / That is, / a poem, like agreat mind at work / on an unsolvable problem, / might by necessity / meander […].”He manages his meandering in such deliberate motions, without a word or thoughtout of place, even through a sequence of explorations through and aroundlanguage, perception and memory. “but Greek loneliness,” he writes, as part ofthe poem “The Greek Gods,” “seems closer to explaining / the forces thatbrought us here / and make me wander / the hospital skybridges / late at night,/ watching that same McDonald’s blinking / into darkness.” Prufer managesmeditative stretches that rhythmically extend and hold across great distances, andsuch intimacy through asking some rather big questions of existence and being, propelledthrough the pacing of what he describes as his fears; and his fears, one mightsay, are legion.
