Matthew Pennock, Sudden Dog.
Alice James Books, 2012. Paperback, 76 pp, $15.95.
Coming up on my twenty-first semester of higher education, I often apologetically disclaim even the most casual conversation by saying, “Please excuse me. I have trouble thinking outside of metaphor.” Matthew Pennock’s debut collection of poetry, Sudden Dog, makes me feel forgiven for this trait. In these poems of hard-won battles against corporeality, meaningfulness, substance abuse, and yes, a non-self-cleaning oven, Pennock consistently masters two characteristics of literary style: metaphor and personification. It might seem an oversimplification to suggest that a book of poetry published in 2012 would succeed in this way. However, Pennock uses these elemental techniques in such a savvy manner, pushing them beyond a base-level articulation into surprising, and pleasing, complication. Ultimately, this creates a speaker who, from an incredibly intriguing perspective, embarks on an epic of meaning-making, illuminating the fractured world’s often distressing reality.
The poem “Try Not To Disturb The Eels” does just this. The entire piece can be read as a metaphor for writing, or perhaps merely making sense of one’s purpose. Its half-cautionary, half-instructional narrative explains the process of entering “the muddy bank”: “For a little while, you may feel unsafe but undeterred. Hands pinned beneath shoulders, / knees sliding in wet earth, you are vulnerable.”
The poem asks you, reader, to imagine yourself in this metaphor, easing into the murky landscape, susceptible to whatever it contains. And you, reader, might say, “I’ve heard this before.” And you would be right. However, Pennock extends the metaphor, stanza after stanza, in such fascinating ways that it makes the poem transcendent.
The speaker’s focus shifts several times back and forth between the physical environment surrounding the water and the perspective of one entering that water, until we get this unforeseen statement: “I have forgotten what you know, what it is to look into a man’s eyes and know / he means you harm. To see his shoulder cocked, his arm jerk, his fingers curl / around each other, the sudden thrash.”
This movement widens the metaphor. Not only has the reader been made aware of the potential harm in the water and his own vulnerability, he is now reminded of a previous violence, articulated as a concrete, aggressive image. By the time the poem gets to the eels, they are anthropomorphized, engaged in the act of writing: “They are down there, deep in the mud, writing an alphabet of S’s in the bottom. / Splash loudly. They are down there. They will squirm. They will sink / their pencil-tip teeth into your calf...”
The eels both comply with and fulfill the metaphor; they become part and parcel of entering this water, and whatever meaning we take from the experience must include them.
“Theoretical Physics,” another poem determined to use metaphor as a means of illustrating the world in which the speaker finds himself, further advances this strategy. Each time the speaker forms a metaphor, he invents another immediately after. After conjecturing the way in which the universe was created, describing his own impairment, the act of rising and then falling, he says:
Call it dancing. Call it two hundred thousand tons of metal and concrete
disappearing into ground. Call it the mujahideen lament
twisting the trouble clef. Call it—
Brilliantly, the poem seems to take over this process, interrupting the speaker to make yet another comparison, as “answers become the size of spoons disclosed to the feeding blind.”
It isn’t just answers or eels that are allowed to enact in interesting manners. This is a book in which a “day is apolitical,” a “cough…adored an ambush,” a cocker spaniel is “expectant as an unlit candle,” and “four-year-sediment” in an oven “submits…to Brillo.” Despite the inherent pathos of its subjects, it is a playful book, certainly an inventive one, unafraid to employ pop culture and quirk in the struggle to reconfigure the world as palatable. In a dog-eat-dog world, this book is a rich treat, a biscuit for all our begging to understand.
