Book Review: Come on All You Ghosts

Since the publication of his first book, American Linden, in 2002, Matthew Zapruder has become a poet of significant interest in Anglo-American letters as well as through translations in German and Slovenian, an international reputation bolstered by his second collection, The Pajamaist, which won the William Carlos Williams Award for poetry in 2006. Zapruder's latest collection, Come on All You Ghosts, shows he has developed into one of the most distinctive voices of his generation.  

There is a tortoise-shell speck of the hipster in Zapruder's urbane word-slinging. Yet, throughout his body of poetry, ironic references wend unexpectedly into deeper territory, sometimes with a single turn of phrase that juxtaposes a subject of complete seriousness with the levity of a quirky, quotidian observation. The tone of Come on All You Ghosts, perhaps predictably, but not obviously, is elegiac. Consider "Poem for Ferlinghetti."

"That constant/ humming sound is time/ coming to take us/ away from each other./ Or the refrigerator,/ keeping the milk cold/ and pure."

As if the narrator were fighting to churn up the courage to express tragedy, the poem glances into the void but only for a moment, quickly turning back to a more comfortable world of cafés and city balconies with pleasing views over pleasant parks. This strobe between light and darkness is glanced, too, in the title of the collection, which dares ghosts to approach but does so boastfully, as if the speaker is unsure he possesses the power not to be overwhelmed by the threatening harbingers of loss.

But those chinks through which Zapruder's poems' darker subjects are glimpsed open up to a deep abyss indeed. "This book you are holding/ is about dying…" he writes in the poem "Looking Up," before going on to recommend we "all go separately into the city and forget/ everything but our little prescriptions."  

This momentary directness can be charming and irritating by turns, as Zapruder's coyness in handling "serious" subjects begins to seem an affect when it appears in multiple poems, like "Papers Toys of the World," in which Zapruder answers the fundamental and ancient question "what is beauty" with "Right now for me these paper replicas/ I glanced at in a book I did not buy."

Yet in poem after poem, what seem to be refusals to confront deep questions turn into a confrontation of culture, as these quotidian observations form a catalog of contemporary life that takes everything from the Hadron Collider to the updated American $5 bills into account.

The voice of these poems is that of a sensitive, highly caffeinated individual, able to look out onto the world with startling insight. Almost as if he were liable to be damaged by his insight, however, the narrator sometimes resists even "coming/ here to my desk" to write, which is, for him, a "search for those terrible/ destructive questions still/ hiding from me."

But even when Zapruder is at his most jittery, he is capable of searing insight and turns of phrase that shock the reader with their sudden aptness, and ones that most often go beyond the constraints of the poem in which they are contained, such as "Little Voice," which is a seemingly personal lyric, until its last lines turn it toward a subject far more public:

"I was just half listening, one quarter wondering/ what the little park the window looked onto was named,/ and one quarter thanking the war I knew was somewhere/ busy returning all those limbs to their phantoms."

The core of the collection is the 13-page title poem in which, like a spectral Whitman, Zapruder calls out to the teeming masses, but not the democratic masses of the American nation. Rather, Zapruder addresses the ghosts those masses - that is, all of us - have become. Zapruder's language is more personal, his voice more colloquial and his references more quotidian than Whitman's ever could have been, but like the original American bard, Zapruder is the spokesman for his vision of American society, be it for New Yorkers after 9/11, those touched by the death of David Foster Wallace or those who sit in Starbucks, listening to Neil Young and reading Zapruder's poems.

Zapruder seems to have donned the electric yoke of the 21st-century poet, asking the ghosts, the readers, the memories, to allow him to shoulder the woes they have inherited: "Come on all you ghosts./ Bring me your lucky numbers/ that failed you, bring me// your boots made of the skin/ of placid animals/ who stood for a while in the snow." It is a powerful sentiment expressed in disconcertingly colloquial language, for, as he writes: "In this poem// every word means exactly/ what it means/ when we use it in everyday life."

Ultimately, the poem and the entire collection show a further maturation of Zapruder's voice, and an increased willingness to stare down the difficult subjects and even, perhaps, to invite them.

Great poets of all ages have had more than charm; they have had an ability, and in many cases a need, to face up to the most difficult subject matter imaginable and to respond to it in a way that seems both personal and universal. Zapruder appears more comfortable doing that in this latest collection, and more importantly, he is doing that distinctly. In the process, he has become a very significant American poet.

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com