Michael Dickman, _Flies_

THE JAMES LAUGHLIN winner of 2010, So far, all of the James Laughlin winners I have read have been worthwhile, but this one stood out. Hard to put down, even... not because reading it was a sheer delight but because it was so much a whole that I felt I had to finish the ride, so to speak, not do it in installments.  As a volume, Flies emphatically feels more like a project than like a collection. Just as listening to an album like Astral Weeks seems to mean listening to all the songs in just that order, not dropping in to hear just "Madame George," so Flies feels almost like it is one poem.

The individual poems resemble each other formally, being largely of short, truncated lines, with one or two lines breaking out and running longer than the actual width of the page. There is a lot of shared vocabulary, and images recur--birds, trees, the sea, the color green, teeth. About midway in the volume is a sequence called "Stations," evoking the Stations of the Cross; the poems before this one have an anticipatory tension, the ones after it a post-catastrophe calm, "Stations" itself seeming like an impossibly sustained moment, a clock ticking unbearably with an arrested minute hand.

The jacket copy states that "the poems grapple with the suicide of an older brother," and that fact certainly provides a strong narrative strand if we want one. Do we? By contrast the "About the Author" statement in the book itself is all reticence: "Michael Dickman was born and raised in Portland, Oregon."

Without the jacket's prompting, I certainly would have read the book as about a child or about the memory of childhood, and would have assumed that a grievous loss, probably a death, had cut that childhood in two, but I wouldn't have concluded that it grapples with the suicide of an older brother. For that matter, the trauma is more conjured up and made to appear before us than it is grappled with, I would say.

In that respect, Flies reminds me of Mary Jo Bang's Elegy, which likewise had a compelling backstory that interviewers and reviewers and a certain kind of reader could fasten onto, but that did not really do all that much to account for the hold the poems had on me. (Maybe it was me who was being grappled with, whom the poems wouldn't let go.)