Book Review

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The Clock Maker's Memoir
by Dan Featherston
73 pp.
Cuneiform Press
$12.00
Order through S.P.D.
(800) 869-7533
or www.spdbooks.org
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It will come as no surprise, given that title, that Dan Featherston's latest full-length collection is composed of poems which are meditations on time. The book is tripartite, with sections titled "Ante Meridiem," "Imaginary Memoir" and "Post Meridiem." The poems contained in each section seem to be rubricized according to a poetic logic, but it's not as simple as A.M.=youth and P.M.=age, although some might try to make that argument based upon certain poems or the thematic flow in various sections of the book.

I found the first section of the book to be the least satisfying, although that's not necessarily negative criticism, as the book is a very strong one. It's just these poems tended to be the ones which--even when successful--had less dramatic tension, less lasting resonance. One of the poems I liked very much from this section was "Janus." Here is the complete poem...

    Janus

  One face we called sadness
  & the other fear.

  The space between was momentum,
  moment, line's increment of time.
  With fugitive origins,
  we never knew which way to face.


I like this interpretation of the two-faced Roman icon which was placed over doorways. Janus was the god of doorways, the New Year, of simultaneous beginnings and endings, of anything straddling the line between past and future. Featherston here crafts a poem about time past and time future using this icon, and captures spectacularly the nervous pivot of the present moment as it exists in consciousness.

For me, it's the second section which really begins the serious poetic work in earnest. This section, "Imaginary Memoir," is filled with very strong love poems, works of memory usually, and then strange poems like this one, which really reminds us of how language itself has a memory, how we are swimming through this long memory of so many who are dead and gone but still speaking through us on a daily basis. This is a poem about a plague that happened to us all, once, very long ago....when I sang this song as a child, I had no idea what it meant. When I held hands with my friends and formed a ring and we spun around in the yard until we all fell down on our asses in the grass, laughing, I had no clue what it meant. Isn't it strange how the dead can touch us sometimes? These dead are from the 14th century and they are singing...

      Nursery

  Plagues float in the nursery air. The game is singling
  out. They sing round the tower, singling out a ring in the
  air. Coupleted cordials of roses & posies keep sickness
  outside the ring. Each rhyme, each round of time spirals
  up inside the air. Holding to flowers & walking in a ring,
  they sing: You must go under. You must go round in the ring of
  time. When turning stops, one goes under to be singled
  out. Flowers to ashes, death is all fall down.


And as I just stated, there are beautiful love poems, hyaline in clarity, where love is written as simply as it should be. Try this:

     Sleep

  She sings, brushing her fingers over my back,
  loosening the knot between us.
  Her songs unstitch me.
  When I fall asleep
  she breaks the thread between her teeth.

Other strong poems in this section include "Birth," "Bullring," in which male sexuality becomes a strange form of sundial ("one horn up /to mark the spot") through a ritual of death, and the memorable elegy "Hole."

The last section of the book, "Post Meridiem" boasts a number of exquisitely strange poems. There is a prose poem, "Albatross," that reads like a strange very short Kawabata Palm-of-the-Hand tale, and there are a few pieces of short fiction rubricized under the title "Dreams in War Time," which are absolutely devastating. I don't want to print any spoilers here, but will say that those short fictions are worthy of Kafka, and once read will not be forgotten.

The Clock Maker's Memoir is very much a collection worth owning. I was surprised to see this first edition was only a run of 250 copies, so I suggest you acquire a copy fast if you want to own this, or you might find yourself waiting for a future edition to go to print (which I am sure will happen). This is a book for those thinkers who always maintained (agreeing with Einstein actually) that there is no such thing as "absolute time," and that there are so many ways for time to flow or freeze, depending on where the witnessing consciousness is located, and how it is composed.

The Clock Maker's Memoir is a memorable study of time and its various (human versus inhuman) standards of measurement. The book is written with a Pongean rigor and imaginativeness, with the poet carefully attuned to the tiniest fluctuations in the substance under scrutiny. He is well aware of how the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle (or a corollary force) impacts his work here, and manages to work with the permanence of uncertainty which turns out to be (surprisingly) poetry itself.

Featherston does a brilliant job of showing us how poems themselves are strange timepieces. True, they seem to be able to hoard time even as they process or sift it, but aren't we the same way? It's a rare individual, and a rare poem, that keeps its present moment clean and flowing. Most of us like to dwell on the eddies and backwaters of time, and the future tendrils we see (or hope we see) materializing.

This book is dedicated to clock makers of that persuasion.

If that's you, find this book.