Hank Lazer: Elegies & Vacations (Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2004. 144pp, pb, 8.5ins x5.5ins. £9.95 / $15.95) Elegies & Vacations is an interesting collection by a poet seeking to find out, through an exploration of form and subject matter, what the poem is capable of sustaining. Cleverly he constructs his frameworks from a familiar world in a language freed from unnecessary ornament, interspersing the beautiful and the objective with the unlovely, painful, inexplicable or banal.

Lazer's experimentation, however, is undertaken from a secure, middle class perspective — this is a golf-playing poet with a good job, social status and a family second home in Hawaii; his social lament is exclusion from country clubs on grounds of his religion, not broader
discrimination. Neither does he seek to question the sign/value systems or politics of the
society he perpetuates. He is a poet of the family, sensitively articulating its pre-9/11 beliefs, fragilities and allegiances which exist for him at the end of the twentieth century.

The eleven poems in this collection vary from the overtly poetical 'to what we are ancestral' – his version of the R S Thomas' lines "From my top boughs / The footprints I can see / That led up to me" –; the well crafted poem 'For John Cage'; the Buddhist 'Sunyata Sonata' with its homage to silence as adjunct of meaning and egolessness – the page unsaturated by symbol; and the more experimental, deeply personal 'Every Now & Then' and 'This One'. But for me the poems which form the beating heart of the book are the poignantly observed 'Deathwatch For My Father' and 'The Abacos', the retelling of a simple family holiday to the Bahamas in all its complexity.

'Deathwatch For My Father', a vivid personal account of slow death, is constructed in the form of a diary noting key instances in a wasting process brought on by leukaemia. Lazer also employs the diary form for the ruminative 'Every Now & Then' and to 'Diamond Head' — preference of the busy executive poet or indication of the conditioned way we signpost our lives? The poem is the enactment of George Oppen's injunction as expressed by Lazer:

.....… to
test poetry in the face
of the worst events

The poem is stark, stripped of all that may distract from the single reality of a man's death — little punctuation, no capital letters (only the mother's grief towards the end of the poem is expressed conventionally) and a layout and typography that sits simply on the page inviting understanding and engagement. Witnessing the father die through a directness of language and the honesty of openly expressed emotion, there is a strange feeling of privilege in our being permitted to share in the pain, the hope and the fading intimacies; we share in the loss of a man who was part relative, part muse:

… you have been
a major part of my poems
since I wrote "point sur"
in 1972 though clearly
poems are not much like
you …

Part of closeness and emphasis of normality between father and son in the poem includes reference to sport, particularly golf – the golf course being the nearest thing we learn to the poet having a church. Part of the 'testing' process the poem undertakes includes creating imagery from golf and applying it simply and directly to imminent death, something which to Lazer's credit he accomplishes with poignant affection:

a long putt
dying at the hole
the ball does turn &
drop but believe me
it's no occasion for joy

The father's dwindling ability to play golf expresses more than a loss of skill, so the mother's profoundest hopes and fears are expressed not by her words but by the books discovered in her bedroom:

against death upon
mom's desk I see
the several
books: perfect
health & love,
medicine, & miracles

A gentle gallows humour pervades the poem adding to its layers of humanity – the story of the California physician who left instructions to be buried in a brown paper bag; the drawn out joke concerning the medical establishment the father tells; and the father's ever present twinkle and business sense:

today I will
price out rates
for cremation
in the grim
humor we share
you say
"son, get me
a good deal"

In the face of grief, here are the practicalities of death; this is no romantic, introspective exercise in grieving remote from the realities of late twentieth century US life but the heartfelt recounting of duty, necessity and emotion in the face of the inevitable.

There is talk too of organ donations and the handing on of goods; but confronted by too painful details of death – the bleeding, breathing problems and despair as the body fails – the family small-talk about life, feign a normality in a world of 'smoked salmon' and 'potato bread'. We follow them through the seesaw of a remission induced by 'experimental' drugs, then once again deterioration. Confronted by his father's inability to get out of the car at a restaurant, Lazer is again forced to question his art:

what is it that the poem
is obligated to do

to which the poet later suggests a type of answer:

a poem a cell
the structure of activity
motion coincident with
a complex equation
as you move

through space & time

Experiencing his father's final disintegration and loss of human dignity, Lazer leaves us with no suggested answers or hints to the meaning of any of the events we have cruelly shared, only an enigmatic final question

if not
the physical body
what are we

The poem has been an essay in response to this, but throughout this elegiac journal, which offers dying as current event, spiritual significance remains always exterior.

'The Abacos', the first of two family vacation poems, through the sunshine, colour and tranquility of the Bahamas and initiates a welcome change of mood. The poem artfully combines ideas of place, event, family vacation, tourism, with a playful critique of the much awarded but little written about American poet, John Ashbery – stylistic echoes of Ashbery detectable in an earlier poem in the book, 'Portrait', exist again here. But this is no romantically perceived, escapist vacation because:

We come here to get away
and, equally, to be here.

and part of the baggage and the holiday attire are the ego and preoccupations brought from home:

at unwise expense have chosen
this vacation as charged antidote
to time's power, glad your
family unit has survived

Thought and the flitting reverie of the mind on holiday are conveyed deliciously:

The intense orange blossoms
of the flame tree perfectly
expressed the longing in
Clarissa's heart. Did I
Write that or did I read it
In the hardbound book
Held by the woman in
The lounge chair beside me,
Red enamelled nails, a crisp
White visor, long blond hair
Drawn in a ponytail,
Long hair for women again in fashion
Though there's no discussion
Of its meaning. Everything
Changes but the will to change.
The hammock criss-crosses
Your back. Tan cautiously.
As vacations go, it's good
Value, transfers not included.

Only the sighting of a shark while scuba diving with his family jolts the poet's mind to consider, through the figure of his son, the illusion of permanence (even of a pleasant memories), and the inexorable, inescapable sculpting of change.

'Diamond Head', like 'The Abacos', is once again a combination of family vacation, exotic location and the everyday banality of existence, but now the family members are different, haunting memories of a dead father abound, the journal form has reappeared and the poet with whom he 'converses' through his reading is this time George Oppen. Oppen was another poet who used the line as determinant of stress and meaning, explored silence as truth (as occurs in 'Sunyata Sonata') and who questioned the purpose of poetry. Lazer makes use of the poem to further continue questions of his own:

must it all come down
to a variegated lament
upon aging & the passage of time

and, finally:

to be truthful then
to its infinite con
tingency its perpetual
inconclusiveness

Elegies & Vacations is the eleventh book of poetry by an intelligent, inquiring poet with an individual voice developed through intimate contact with a US literary tradition. His language – simple/transparent, elusive/philosophical, reasoned/objective – is controlled, directed, evocative, often with the intimacy of speech. Lazer is a man for his time and milieu but his depictions of the human situation transcend; his doubts, questions, hopes and uncertainties exist for all.

Copyright © John Couth, 2004. All quotations here are copyright © Hank Lazer.