DM Bradford, Bottom Rail on Top

 

                                                Not a poem

but plantation diningroom
    ceiling pulley fan
boy fatherlands and rope

I’mjust now seeing a copy of Montreal-based poet and translator DM Bradford’ssecond full-length collection, Bottom Rail on Top (Kingston ON: BrickBooks, 2024), a follow-up to Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books,2021) [see my review of such here]. Composed across an accumulated thirteenpoem-sections, from “rope to” and “ashes to” to “new corps” and “lil chug,” theshort poems of Bottom Rail on Top exist as sketch-notes, lyric burststhat suggest the gesture but are intricate and precise in their execution. As theback cover offers: “Somewhere in the cut between Harriet Jacobs andsurveillance, Southampton and sneaker game, Lake Providence and the supplychain, Bottom Rail on Top sees D.M. Bradford stage one personal presentalongside American histories of antebellum Black life and emancipation—a calland response between the complications of legacy and selfhood.” There is a kindof call-and-response to how these poems assemble, a through-line of notes andtheir commentary, akin to a kind of Greek chorus or counter-narrative. Each section,a cluster of short sketch-poems, with the occasional prose-commentary,providing a blend of further narrative, additional information and a kind ofsumming-up, set at the end of a handful of sections. The third section, “stock,”for example, ends with a prose block that begins: “Not a poem but a successionof little cuts. You hear about Sally Hemings over and over again. You don’t hearthat much about Martha Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s first wife, being Sally’shalf-sister. You don’t hear much about Betty Hemings, Martha’s father’s enslavedmistress, Sally’s mother. You don’t hear much about the other half-siblings,how many of them Martha, along with Thomas, inherited, the Hemings family among135. Commonplace horrors.” Not a poem, Bradford repeats as a mantra across thetitle of each poem and the opening of each commentary, suggesting a pushagainst the impossibility of the lyric while simultaneously offering its artifice,even as the poems work through and across it, connecting Bottom Rail on Topto works such as M NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (Toronto ON: The MercuryPress, 2008) [see my archived review from The Antigonish Review here], for example. “Not a poem,” Bradford writes, near the end of thefifth section, “but to write at last / past the old place / one last time // byboat / the breeze and the sunshine / north by fatherlands / ten days and tennights [.]”

AsBradford’s debut worked through an absent father, Bottom Rail on Top alsoruns as a book-length project wrapping around layers and application of lyricstudy around history, ancestry and echoes of slavery and the American south. Toclose the first section, Bradford’s untitled prose-block begins: “Not a poem,but a big house is a big house. Imagine I’m standing in one being told everybrick that makes it up was made on site by children. That said children didn’t notlook like me, and kept the fire going around the clock. Imagine the tour guideannouncing all this, dressed to look like the mistress of the house. Someonehelps dress her in the morning, pile the whole thing on, button it up the back.”The shadow of history is long indeed, even moreso if one doesn’t attempt tounderstand it, as Bradford writes to open the acknowledgments:

This work would not existwithout the tether of ancestors enslaved in the so-called United States andJamaica. In these outgrowths of the simple history I was raised with, that wasmeant to raise a Black man and an American, I look for them and find I can’tpossibly know them. Looking at my life, I’m certain those ancestors, along withthe many enslaved Africans this book is indebted to, would sooner recognize itsmastery than its subjection. This work was in no small part shaped bythat thought. And everything that connects me to them despite it.