Gunpowder
Review by Laura Villareal
In Novelist as Vocation, Haruki Murakami quipped, “The way I see it, people with brilliant minds are not particularly well suited to writing novels.” Not a knock towards novelists necessarily, but rather a clarification that the writing of a novel is a matter of stubborn persistence and altogether a different task than that of the poet. The transition from prose writer to poet is a shift many writers overestimate and attempt clumsily. When thinking about Alba and Other Songs, which is astonishingly Fred Arroyo’s first publication in the genre of poetry, this information arises as pertinent. Arroyo is the author of several other books including the short story collection Western Avenue and Other Fictions, the novel The Region of Lost Names, and the essay collection Sown in Earth: Essays of Memory and Belonging. Across Arroyo’s books, there is a clear lean towards lyrical narrative, metaphorical gestures, and fragmentation much of which feels informed by a poetic toolkit. Alba and Other Songs is the distinct culmination of a poet’s sensibilities and a prose writer’s trained timing for unraveling narrative.
Like so many poets, Arroyo hones in on topical obsessions in his writing that he considers from multiple vantage points, and in his case, through different genres. In particular, his focus on memory shines throughout his writing oeuvre. In Sown in Earth: Essays of Memory and Belonging he writes, “Memories don’t arrive chronologically or voluntarily—they bloom one after the other like flowers in the spring, colorful, and full one day from the dirt that still smells of winter, like spots of blood appearing on a tile floor when you don’t even know you’ve been cut. I never have to search for them or call them forth.” Memory is a filament that he expertly weaves into lyrical narrative. His writing brims with vivid descriptions of place and time, but more importantly they house emotional landscapes of loss and longing. He writes,
My father hardly ever said a word to me.
He held his language, his family,
his lovely garden so close
to his rolled up sleeves, so tight
within his fists, that words, I thought
must be terrible, so painful
he never wanted to mouth them
only wanted to strike them,
never wanted to release them
like the white butterflies fluttering
between his pumpkin blossoms
and green rosemary
The repetition of “so” as in “so close,” “so tight,” and “so painful” amplifies the feeling of tension. It gives the sense that those words alone—close, tight, painful—were not enough alone to describe the intensity of the father’s quiet. The images of “rolled up sleeves” which typically connotes getting to work and the seemingly frivolity of “white butterflies fluttering / between his pumpkin blossoms and green rosemary” reveal where the father’s values rest. These lines are the first to evoke sensory imagery that expands the landscape of the poem. Superficially, there is simply beauty in the garden, but these plants are strategic. Gardeners often plant rosemary as a companion to plants they want to deter pests from so its place in the poem emphasizes the father’s prioritization of what is useful.
The poem continues:
never wanted to inflict them
like the leather strap
he took from a rusty nail
on a post in the kitchen
to quiet my questions,
my eager and loud talking,
my childhood singing.
Shifts like this are exemplary of the way memory works in Arroyo’s writing. Unbound to temporality and, as he aptly described, memories “bloom one after the other.” In his careful exploration, Arroyo contends with masculinity and patrilineality where too often violence is used by men to affirm themselves—masculinity’s laziness and lack of imagination in matters of conflict. In putting these scenes together, a more complex picture of the father illuminates. He is capable of tending to a garden with a sensible and collaborative approach, but unable to use the same technique with his own child.
The poem shifts into a dream the speaker had about his father in the “Park of Pigeons” before diving into its final turn:
Decades passed.
There was no time left to blame,
or forgive. I loved the smell
of old leather. His brown face,
streaked with salt, waves.
He wiped his eyes.
Opened his mouth.
We both looked to the sky
as the pigeons sprang up
and whirled in the alabaster light.
So much is conveyed in Arroyo’s thoughtful building of this stanza. Leather returning as an image that once induced pain, transforms for the speaker into beloved and olfactory. Perhaps because smell elicits memory. Even though he writes “There was no time left to blame, / or forgive,” the sentence that follows, “I loved the smell / of old leather. His brown face,” confides the speaker’s forgiveness and tender feelings for his father in its enjambments. It’s difficult to not read the lines without wanting to include “his brown face” in the list of what the speaker loves. The line that follows, “streaked with salt, waves” reveals an uncharacteristic moment of vulnerability for the father which feels meant to soften any justified bitterness.
“Alba Blanca” which is the first poem in the chapbook exemplifies the strengths of Arroyo’s poetry. Though a close-reading on a single poem may seem unusual in a review, it is meant to encourage and prime those interested in Alba and Other Songs to look closely at each poem. In Alba and Other Songs, the poems unfold with intentionality and often times images of natural beauty. Rarely do the poems offer a straightforward path through them— their layers request the same reverence the speaker gives his subjects. In return they offer, as Arroyo writes in “Alba,” a “(palette, tune, mood), new seed” for those ready to attune themselves.
