Naming the Dead

by Robert Collins

Robert Collins takes the reader into "the blind world here below," a world inhabited by sinners, saints, and strangers, who often are one and the same. From childhood playgrounds through the suffering of adulthood, the heart of the collection is made of eight elegies literally naming the dead and paying homage to some who have served as mentors and companions on the journey. We learn, then, that the only way to return home is to keep moving forward. Thus, the poet offers hope, however tentative, that those who enter the abyss might like Dante "ascend into the shining world again."

Genres: Poetry

102 pages, Paperback

First published July 12, 2012

About the author

Born in New Jersey, Robert Collins was educated in Ohio, where he received his A.B. from Xavier University and M.A. and Ph.D. from Ohio State University. While at OSU he received two Academy of American Poets prizes. He has published poems in a variety of 1iterary magazines, including Ascent, Charlotte Poetry Review, Chattahoochee Review, Cimarron Review, Connecticut Review, College English, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Hiram Poetry Review, Louisville Review, Manhattan Review, Poems & Plays, Prairie Schooner, South Coast Poetry Journal, Southern Humanities Review, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review, and Tar River Poetry. He has received two Individual Artists Fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize several times, and received the Ascent Award for Poetry, selected by Brendan Galvin. He taught American literature and creative writing at the University of Alabama in Birmingham where he founded and edited Birmingham Poetry Review and directed the creative writing program.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bob Collins' Naming the Dead is a superb collection by a veteran poet and editor. It could properly be considered a "selected poems" as well as a "first book," for it distills the essence of a poet's life and experience. An accomplished--and widely published--poet like Collins must have rejected scores of chapbook pieces in order to pare this collection down to forty poems this good, this focused, this resonant in theme.

The book consists of seven sections--a one poem prelude, a one poem coda, and five movements of six-ten poems.

The first movement concerns Collins' New Jersey childhood. The music of the verse is casual and accomplished, belying the grim vision of the poems. Although the tone is elegiac, it is elegy as sharp and clear-eyed as "The Seafarer." Whatever the object of youth's memory may be--a polio epidemic, vacant lot baseball, the dreaded "rich kid" little league rivals--the memory itself is always at the mercy of the brushfires of time, fires that blot out the self and leave nothing but the terror of nonexistence that waits in the primeval waters below. My favorites here are the first and last: "Enuresis," a poem about bed-wetting which lulls the mind with anapestic latinate terms until the word "night terrors" brings it to a chilling conclusion, and "Catch," a poem that captures both the anger and the love of a ritual father-son game.

The second movement consists primarily of older poems, more rough-hewn in style, but powerful. The two sections complement one another, for each poem here serves as a myth or metaphor for the plight articulated in the first movement, and they too are filled with images of fire and water, each poem heavy with the burdens of death, memory and time. My favorite is the one about a new "Magician's Assistant," who expects a trap door to open during the saw-in-half trick, but instead finds herself literally disembodied, transformed into a sea of floating molecules with a terrifying emptiness between.

The third movement is the best, central both in position and theme. It consists primarily of elegies for deceased friends and acquaintances. Collins assessment of these people is clear-eyed but generous, and he is hard on no one but himself. It ends with my two favorite poems in this section, each offering the possibility of love and hope: "New Year's Day: Red River Gorge (1973)" in which the typically frightening image of conflagration is transformed into a friend's welcoming bonfire, and "Via Sacra," in which the poet makes a difficult river journey near Adena burial mounds with two living friends by his side.

Movements four and five are less concentrated and more varied in theme, and both are more open to love, light and humor than the movements that have gone before. Four is full of the mundane experiences of life (cleaning out the garage, teaching a daughter to swim, finding out you have only one reader on amazon.com), and movement five functions as a recapitulation of the themes--the impossibility of return, the necessity of the journey, the importance of love and hope--and also brings something new, a touch of hard-won optimism. My favorite poems here are "Going Home," a somewhat bleak, although humorous, view of an American's "return" to Ireland, and "Listening to the Dead (Birmingham, 1995)," which begins in irony and Grateful Dead nostalgia and ends in a hope and--almost--a belief in the transforming power love.

I highly recommend "Naming the Dead." This is a book by a man of solitude who understands friendship and love, a man ready to take us on a rich, fulfilling journey of everything he--and we--have lost.

[FutureCycle Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:


THE EDITOR OF DREAMS

She works all night
while the darkness flickers,
clipping and splicing each frame
before passing the reels
to the sleepy projectionist.

Sometimes she includes bad takes
you don’t remember shooting.
Out of control you’re falling
from a hundred stories up,
a stunned, unhappy double.

Or you come to being chased
down half-deserted city streets,
a scream stuck in your throat.
Or you wake up one day paralyzed,
water already seeping under the door.

She always censors the sex scenes,
rousing you abruptly
at the very moment of sweetness,
leaving you alone and forlorn
inside the dark theater.

Near dawn she yawns and stretches
and gets ready to head home,
the screen blank, the marquee dark,
the ticket window shuttered.
She boards the last express

before it turns into the shadows
and the lower side of town.
Spools of over-exposures
you’re not yet ready to view
unfurl on the cutting-room floor.


RUNNING IT ALL BACK

Is it just another game the kids like,
weary with home movies of summers
they hardly recall and freckled strangers
whose somersaults, giggles, and squeals

they don’t recognize as their own?
I watch myself flip out of the lake
backwards onto the board
like a pilot in trouble ejecting.

The picnic lunch reconstitutes itself.
It’s all coming back to me now—
the ball we tossed at the lake that day
flies into my palm, at last the perfect catch,

the keys I fumbled with and dropped
spring into my suddenly magnetized fingers,
ready again to unlock doors
I’ve begun to ease away from.

We walk backwards toward the car
and back away recklessly toward home.
And I want to run it all back,
past all the sorrow and pain,

harsh words swallowed never to be spoken,
and maybe somewhere we’d be in love again.
I’m beginning to see what chances we take
and what the world will be like without us

when we’re gone, the silence in locked houses
where we have not, will never arrive.

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bob rocks!