Loyalty: New and Selected Poems ($16.00) (Off the Grid Press, P. O. Box 84, Weld, Maine 04285), published 2006.
By Henry Braun ( Review by Pam Rosenblatt)
Sometimes a book gets published and it’s soon forgotten. Other times, a book is published and it’s always remembered. In 2006, poet Henry Braun wrote Loyalty: New and Selected Poems, a five chapter, one hundred and twenty-four page poetry book that is still being appreciated three years later, in 2009.
In Loyalty, Braun writes about experiences – personal and impersonal, realistic and imaginary, concrete and abstract. His poems are about Maine, war, family, religion, work (writing, farming, the world of the printing press), and more. He writes with wit, humor, imagination, and truthfulness. He creates metaphors and personas with impeccable skill and is often playful with language. He is a true poet.
Winner of the 2008 Poetry Award from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, Braun’s Loyalty depicts the views of an American Jewish male born in the 1930s and living up into the 2000s. It’s a work that many people, especially people of his generation, can appreciate. Braun has consolidated poems into this book that reveal sides of American life that few have yet written.
A modern, experimental book, Loyalty is academic at times, down-to-earth at times, personal at times, pastoral at times, mythological at times, and truthful most of the time. It’s a book well worth the read.
In Loyalty, Braun often uses persona to catch the reader’s attention and draw him into the poem. Usually, the speaker is so creatively depicted that the poem is a joy to read. From the start of the book, Braun introduces the persona “I” as reflective of himself.
The first poem, “Dreamer” (p. 9), the speaker immediately tells the reader something personal in a way that goes against ordinary thought. In the first three lines of the first stanza, Braun writes:
At night I go home to my country
in the waters of sleep
which is an island with a sea collar.
Here the speaker “I” has the reader totally confused – yet intrigued at the same time. The words “At night I go home” are very down to earth and practical, for don’t most people “go home” at lease one point of the day, especially at night? But Braun throws the reader for a loop. He has the speaker “go home” to a special place, a place that he owns and no one else is citizen. The speaker “go(es) to my country / in the waters of sleep”. Oh, how the speaker cherishes “the waters of sleep”, or dreaming.
But the speaker isn’t simply dreaming. The state of mind the speaker, or “dreamer” is in is similar to “an island with a sea collar”. Braun seems to be suggesting this island is a metaphor for freedom with some definite constrictions. Is this speaker, the “I” of the introductory poem, supposed to be the poet Henry Braun himself? Or is the “I” just a starting point for Braun to develop his creative, imaginary thought which, in this poem, “blossom(s)” into a “Crusoe-like…island / fact and island figure, 2, 3 . . ./ apparitional in moonlight.”
The speaker concludes “Dreamer” with another interesting metaphor, saying that his dreams are covered by “The extra eyelid I wear / (that) preserves my geography of dream.” So Braun has created a persona of “I” that doesn’t have two but three eyelids, with the third eyelid’s protecting the internal physical features of his dreams, or what the eye perceives underneath the eyelid. Most of this poem flows easily until the reader reaches this last stanza, a stanza that is out of the ordinary and somewhat confusing – or eye-opening. Where did the extra eyelid come from? And it must be there to help the reader understand that the mind’s eye play an important role in the pages that follow.
Chapter one’s “Small Talk in Weld” (p. 13) is more concrete and localized than “Dreamer”. Braun, a citizen of Weld, Maine, has captured the commonness and loyalty found in this small town through the use of the persona “I”. Here the “I” is solid. Weld is a place filled with “Blessèd small talk” like “Whew!” and “It’s a wet one! / in the village store, in from the weather.” Life is, or appears to be simple and straightforward, in Weld.
But the speaker suggests that this trait is only on “the surface of the skin” for “The local watershed refills / the wells of individual desire.” It appears that the people of Weld are dreamers, too, like the “I” in “Dreamer”. They don’t have to conform to the mainstream underneath their “skin”; they have the ability to imagine. Braun has captured the reader’s interest with the words “the wells of individual desire”. What is to follow next?
What follows next is the poem “Under Mt. Blue” (pp. 14 – 16). Here the speaker is like a farmer who “Grow(s) Lettuce”, like a grave digger for a warble, and like an ox who finds that “For me, a field with a horse / is like a sentence with helpful punctuation.” Braun’s speaker has let the reader into his life. The speaker may or may not be Braun. The speaker may be a different voice for each separate section in “Under Mt. Blue”.
Two main metaphors in first three section of this five part poem. One metaphor seems to be of a sexual nature and the second metaphor may be about the act of writing, or Braun introducing his trade of writing to the reader. Like the ox and the horse, Braun has given us “a sentence with helpful punctuation.” I think what Braun means is how punctuation assists reading, understanding words in a sentence, much the same way a horse lessens the work load for the ox in section three of “Under Mt. Blue”.
The fourth section of “Under Mt. Blue” (pp. 14 -16) reveals the speaker’s love of the written book and how amazed the speaker, or “you”, is that “Someone was alive / whom you followed by oil lamp / for hours through the pages” has written down these words in this book “you” just read. Braun uses the word “you” in generic terms. Anyone could be “you” – the reader, the speaker, or Braun himself. In this stanza, Braun seems amazed at creativity and imagination and how these two things play such important parts in everyday life.
Braun also writes pastoral poems, like “So I Gather” (p. 96). In this poem, the speaker “I” is an not-so-accomplished gardener but Braun proves himself an established poet who easily conjures up nature’s images through concrete, vivid word selection.
All thumbs, none green,
I gather for gardenless
wildflowers come upon singly.
Here’s the clammy albino
mushroom posing like a bluebell
newborn from hell,
Old Man’s Beard close by Virgin’s Bower,
and down our unmowed path
one lotus rafting on its pond.
Then, more than the itself of the bug,
a waterwalker’s shadow lengthening its sprawl
as just another.
So on my summer afternoon I gather
my chances, each distinct among
the contradancing double helices.
Braun’s “So I gather” reflects nature in its natural setting. The fungus and flowers are all wild, as suggested when he writes “Here’s the clammy albino / mushroom posing like a bluebell / newborn from hell, / Old Man’s Beard close by Virgin’s Bower, / and down our unmowed path” Even “the bug” that Braun writes about is free as it is “a waterwalker’s shadow lengthening its sprawl / as just another.” These descriptive images are far more developed that the “Blessed small talk” such as “Whew!” and “It’s a wet one…” found in “Small Talk in Weld”, a poem that was discussed at the beginning of this review. To think that fungi, flowers, and a bug have developed more freely than mankind is amazing.
To Braun, nature has impact, and mankind needs to heed it.
Throughout Loyalty, Braun writes about his relationship with his father, as written in the first stanza of “Growing Up in the 1940s” when the speaker says,
My first Complete Shakespeare, blue and heavy,
a birthday gift from my father,
lay on the table of our room.
I bent and riffled the onionskin for hours.
After his graveyard shift, my father,
dispatcher of the Aerocobra,
slept, a rising-falling, white-sheet mound.
Our quiet was being fought for in Europe.
Like most young boys of the World War II era, the speaker “I” reveals the irony of war in “Growing Up in the 1940s” for his father and other soldiers were fighting, perhaps dying in Europe while the typical American civilian was just living his/her life. This inner conflict is also revealed very descriptively when the young speaker says, “I bent and riffled the onionskin for hours. / After his graveyard shift, my father, / dispatcher of the Aerocobra, / slept, a rising-falling, white-sheet mound.” The young speaker is proud of his father for protecting him and fellow Americans.
Throughout Loyalty, Braun often writes about growing up Jewish in America, as seen in “Initiation into Chaos” (p. 97) and “Kosher” (pp. 72 – 73). Braun even works Yiddish words like “alter kocher” (p. 78) which means “old person” and “schmooz” (p. 22) which means “informal chat” into various poems throughout this book. Braun obviously has a background in Judaism, especially Yiddish, and the speaker, like the poet, is proud of that background.
Braun has created an emotionally well-balanced speaker who appreciates being American as well as Jewish. It seems vital to the speaker to remain loyal to his upbringing, his religion, his nature, his belief system, and his country. The combination of Braun’s values blends together in a very special and enlightening way. Loyalty: New and Selected Poems is a thinking person’s book. It is a read well received.
### Bibliography:
Berleant, Anne, Series Coordinator, “Poet Henry Braun”, Maine Writer’s Series, Friends
Of Witherle Memoral Newsletter, 2008. 6/7/2009.
Maine Festival of the Book, May 15-17, 2008, pp. 1-4.
http://www.mainereads.org/festival08_authorbios.asp
“Robinson Crusoe”, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 6/7/2009.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Crusoe
“Robinson Crusoe”, About.com, 6/7/2009.
http://classiclit.about.com.od/robinsoncrusoe/fr/aafpr_robinson.htm
