Cecil Helman: Irregular
Numbers of Beasts and Birds
(Quale Press, Florence, Mass., 2006; paperback,
91pp, $12.00; isbn 0-9744503-5-9)
Cecil Helman's new book of prose poems will make you
smile; for the most part anyway. The cover of Irregular Numbers
of Beasts and Birds is a busy, if slightly scary, complex of colours
painted by the author and it reflects the contents. Helman has
structured his collection in four sections based on the seasons:
starting with an overheated summer, he dips the novelty headlights
to subdued clowning for autumn (fall) and winter, then lifts his
broad beams to welcome the spring.
I know that's over the top. It's just that, though all under
a page, these prose poems are often vivid to the point of brashness and
I'm suffering a little bit of a metaphorical sugar-rush. This is
not necessarily such a bad thing. Perhaps there's not enough sugary
brashness in contemporary poetry. It's nice to get childishly and
legally high, and happily I'm pretty sure Helman's confection
is going to sustain me until dinner.
Even the darker prose poems here (and some of them are very dark)
have a sort of lurid fascination that chills almost like a teen horror
movie. Take 'Just like that'. I wonder if this is a reference
to Tommy Cooper? Like Cooper, Cecil Helman often disguises a trick that
would otherwise seem contrived with slapstick, in this case rather grim
slapstick:
Like the way the tubes flow into his veins, like the plastic tributaries
of some great red river. Like the mournful beep-beep of the machine beside
him. Like the way its green fluorescent numbers pulsate like a miniature
heart.
The piece continues in the same vein and concludes:
That shrug and sigh. Yes that's what it like. Just like
that.
In this series of analogies focussing on a heart's demise it is
impossible to decide whether what's going on inside the dying man
is like what's going on outside or vice versa. Playing on the ambiguity
inherent in full-stop-as-breath directed punctuation Helman's silent
subject 'it' evolves and alters. As a result the natural
and the manufactured become grotesquely interchangeable. This device,
simultaneously unifying and mystifying disparate subjects, haunts the
collection. Cecil Helman is both a medical man and an anthropologist,
so if anyone should have some ideas about this indeterminate-intermediary
reality connecting man and his analogous environment then it's
him.
The repeat-structure of arrhythmic analogies, an uneven
list depicting the heartbeat, falters at the end of this prose poem,
the pattern broken; perhaps a slightly cheap trick, but effective enough
in context. It reminds me of the TV version of the bionic man: endearingly
crap with low production values and dated special effects. Helman just
supplies the bionic man with a sad ending. That's not quite fair but…
This pertains to the only real gripe I have with this collection. The
tone throughout is so often flippant that when serious subjects are advanced
it is sometimes hard to take them seriously. This can work to the author's
advantage, in that some of his subject-matter doesn't seem all
that tasteful and the bright tone paradoxically muffles this. For instance,
I'm not sure that including a prose poem with the title 'Mad
Woman' is quite OK in a primarily absurdist collection partially
reliant on disjunctive narratives. Maybe I'm being squeamish. I'm
told I can be something of a prude. Here are a few morsels:
Mad woman, wild hair, smelly clothes… Says she's the Queen
of England… Declares herself to be the Pope. Or Popess… Declares
war on America. Or peace. Says she's a psychiatrist. Not
a patient.
The balanced phrases, answering opposites like primary colours, are
disrupted in the last line with an equivocal 'maybe'. As
in 'Just like that', there is a flourished finale orchestrated
by breaking a pattern with a minor epiphany. This is an example of how
sentences in this collection tend to interact: ideas develop through
classically balanced purely rhythmical (not syntactically structural)
clauses until a final cadence is reached, often in the form of a coda
or small unit of language that breaks free from the pattern that precedes
it. Though effective, this technique is deployed so frequently that the
repetition becomes a little wearing on the ear. It also has the effect
of deadening the (well, this) reader's response to Helman's
keen sense of absurdist playfulness, which is a pity as there's
great pleasure to be derived from it. I'm going to quote 'Flour' in
full, otherwise the effect is lost:
A man made of flour writes his biography. It's about his inner
life, but also about his outer form. How he was once bread, then became
biscuits, then occasionally cake. It tells of his days as a tart, his
years living abroad as a baguette. It's the story of who baked
him, who ate him, who spat him out. Which ones mixed him with butter
and milk, which ones sweetened him with sugar. It's a tale of burnt
toast, but also one of marmalade.
The absurdist element is tempered by a meta-realism that brings you
out in sympathy (and more smiles) because flour is so ordinary, so necessary
and so biddable. The analogy is beautiful and strikingly simple. Creating
a sympathetic, everyday, absurdist character is not easy and it can be
excruciating when an attempt fails, but also really refreshing when,
as here, a poet scores a bulls-eye. I'm pretty sure my maternal
grandmother would have liked this poem, and she didn't like anything
much.
So the digest is: Cecil Helman writes prose poetry with
a nod towards New Sentence and a performance-oriented approach
to punctuation. As such, the poems rely on sentences for their structures,
with occasional alien full stops thrown in to indicate major breathing
points. Sometimes sense is not linear, but Helman's not too strict about
this. He wants you to have a good time, and he always looks like he's
having fun himself even when he probably shouldn't be. The style feels
a bit samey if you read the whole book in one sitting, but dip
in and you'll probably find something to interest you. Helman's
not trying to ruffle anyone's feathers. There's nothing particularly
experimental here, but some species of traditionalist probably
won't like Helman because he doesn't use line-breaks. On balance,
it's their loss. And it's all the more cake, marmalade, and confection
for us.
