BOOK REVIEW:
MUSCLE MEMORIES OF LOVE AND DISASTER
BY TIM MAYO
A BOOK REVIEW BY EDEN HEFFRON-HANSON
This is how I feel: I don’t turn to poetry when things are good. The refuge of poetry lies where the world has deserted, where I have failed to make way under the direction of prose. The first poems I fell in love with were “I Go Back to May 1937,” “History of a Tough Motherfucker,” “Vera, From My Childhood,”. These are poems that are close to you, that sound like things people might tell you over a cigarette, testaments to the fact that whether we choose life, life has chosen us. This is a similar poetics to Tim Mayo, who in his book Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster writes “the business of poetry is not po-biz”.
Mayo writes, to misuse his words, “from the very bottom/ of the old wishing well.” Set in hospital beds and rehab centers, from the bare-faced grief of losing a daughter to the “Anthropology of Old Age”, it is poetry that feels dragged from the ends of the earth to keep its reader and writer warm. Despite the poet’s remark in “The Sunshine” that “It’s not like I had one of those episodes,” (a near death experience), “and I suddenly feel warm and fuzzy,” the poetry feels decidedly Orphic, from an underworld where death is always resting nearby.
Mayo’s narrators write alongside a chorus of ghosts collected from a lifetime. The poet writes they are not “a soft touch poet with a heart of gold,” but I can’t help feeling the counselor from the book’s latter half bleeding through. In “The Why Answers”, a narrator, fading in and out of consciousness on “medicine mixing meant to keep me alive,” remarks, “suddenly I want to love in a way/I never knew.” The book is populated with elegies orbiting the realization of death, where the approaching end forces us to appreciate the mess of living. To me, there is a basic desire in these poems to provide fuel to the fire, to discover reasons to live.
The book is split into three sections concerned with the ends of consciousness. The first, a collection of elegies and portraits, imagines the “heightened state/slackened to a palatable point,” the place where the living mind can’t follow the dead. In the second, collections of direct addresses after a near death experience, prove that “memory is life.” The third takes place within the society of a psychiatric hospital, where the poet is Cassandra, trading with figures to “advise…how to thwart the tragedies and mishaps…already lived.” The poetry in this book is largely past-tense, trading on the preparation for a tragedy that has already struck.
Though, of course, this is a simplification. The book is interspersed with landscapes and portraits set apart from the rest, operating as introductions and footnotes. A heron insists on reality despite our attempts to resurrect the dead, a hurricane floods unseen, elms grow despite their apparent extinction, and an eagle rests outside the window of a complicated psychiatric hospital society. The interjected poems speak to nature’s seeming indifference, either to human despair or human fantasizing, or perhaps to gifts to which we are oblivious of in our groping for safety, a “bouquet of storm-fed jetsam/the jumbled world must have offered us.” All of them struggle to make sense of disaster and recomplicate the human griefs at the book’s center.
The book finds some formal variation. Poems like “A Game of Cards,” where a character conceit emitted from wisdom and memory becomes “a higher force from a not so ancient past,” then secretes back into an off-kilter reality, feels playfully loose and winding. Other poems, such as “Self-Portrait with Trache,” with its “Grief is a black parrot in my throat,” find itself downstream from Dickinson in a more pruned lineage. It’s hard to notice at first the way the collection is sculpted, with memories seeming to wind in an out of their own accord, but Muscle Memories gives itself over to second and third readings, where the relationship to death throughout the book is repeatedly complicated, welcomed, mused about, and feared.
Modern poetry seems obsessed with space, with stanzas blown to pieces, erased and abstracted, or left to secrete on the page. Entering Muscle Memories I was nearly overwhelmed by the welcoming received from the writing. It’s a collection, again, not interested in “po-biz”, that I feel is all business. The collection has no time to waste between the reader and the portraits of loved ones in the book, the proximity to death in the collection requires immediacy, making sense of days when “you just lived./Each day must have been the same.” It is a book, in some ways of twilights, and any reader interested in survival after survival, in “Muscle Memories of Disaster”, will find refuge here.
MUSCLE MEMORIES OF LOVE AND DISASTER
BY TIM MAYO
AVAILABLE THROUGH BAINBRIDGE ISLAND PRESS
Eden Heffron-Hanson is a writer and poet living in Queens, New York. She traditionally writes love poems but in her down time would looooove to review your work (edenheffha@gmail.com or @edenheffha on Instagram). She has been published in Beyond the Veil Press, South Broadway Press, and Trans Mag.
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