Victoria Korth
Book Review: Narrative Wading in a Stream of Consciousness, Headstone by Mark Elber
Headstone, Mark Elber’s debut collection, winner of the 2022 Henry Morgenthau III Poetry Prize, leaves a feeling of joyful uplift and verve. At nearly 100 pages it bears no end-stops, but rather seems to pour out. Although the title implies something fixed, an end-stop in itself, this volume is about living memory, it embodies a long-seasoned urgency, the author’s intense need to speak both to those he loves and about those he loves. Rich with specific detail and emotionally singing diction, this collection displays no self-pity or, even in the occasional alert commentary, any false distance or posture. In his author’s note, Elber says, “with a first book of poems coming at the age of 70, I’ve accumulated quite a number of people to whom I am grateful.” He also has many to attend to within Headstone’s five robust sections, and poetic influences—from Whitman to Allen Ginsberg, Phil Levine, Edward Hirsch, and others—to which these poems pay unique homage.
“Headstone,” in particular, honors Whitman. The opening of the second stanza: “On the family gravesite the grass is trimmed like your father’s beard / Your father’s beard that never had the chance to gray” echoing “And now grass seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves” from Leaves of Grass. Elber embraces long lines as well as long poems, an expansiveness I find refreshing, especially in an age of lyric compression and tonal detachment, Flow, spiritual, sexual and temporal, flow as a function of memory and as a correlate to movement, the passage between parts of the author’s life, from one geographical place to another, one mode of transport to another, between the living and the dead, functions as motif essential to both this volume’s form and content. One senses the author standing in the center of a mighty stream, “always in the middle” as he says in the masterpiece, “The Ingathering of Exiles,” “til the very end.”
The driving narrative force in the book is the relationship with the father, a fascinating figure— WW II refugee , Polish Jew, physician, survivor—with whom, and with whose image, the narrator struggles throughout his life. Yet entwined in the struggle is a consciousness of the father’s greatness, and his unknowability, a depth of vision seemingly gifted to this son which allows him to recognize a basic truth: as unknown as God is to us, we are to each other. Yet, with the faith of a truly introspective person, this seeking gaze leads to a joyous impasse. Time and again the narrator accepts his limited point of view and celebrates it with a full heart.
Headstone opens with the father’s death memorialized in the beautiful poem “Requiem.” It then moves seamlessly into the author’s birth, “I was born on a Saturday, 10:47 a.m. / An inch of snow coating Astoria, Queens,” from “Saturday.” Here the narrator quickly establishes a delightful specificity which works to weight the long emotionally riffing sentences and as a means to alter their tone with quicksilver rapidity. “My small hands gripped his dark sleeve,” he says of his father in “Further Notes from the Underground,” lines we feel as well as see. Elsewhere, the father’s hands holding “blue globe, displaying the distance between our births,” “gripping the steering wheel,” capable hands in which the author finds safety and strength, hands which soften with age. And vehicles of transportation which have so much iconic power, from the elevated subway, “the Flushing local,” the green Q-60 bus, the father’s “new ’55 green Mercury getting us / from Silkman Avenue to Long Island on Sundays,” and the absolutely wonderful hand-me-down Valiant in which so much happens (from the eponymous “Blue Methuselah”), vehicles which function, in general, as a kind of objective correlative, allowing the author to move from continent to continent and from one developmental stage to another. There are surprising juxtapositions in imagery and a bold descriptive power: the World’s Fair’s “gutted globe,” his father’s coffin a ”lid lathed from a tree and lowered / into the mute earth,” the Valiant’s “radiator barely holding in its hiss,” moments in which the physical expands the psychological.
But without absorbing ourselves in each poem, we can’t appreciate Headstone’s fullness, its musicality, the powerful use of repetition and anaphora which echo ways of speaking as well as texts—many of which I would like to be more familiar with—references that often feel so detailed and layered, I often wished Headstone had come with an index and notes. Lines in Requiem, the opening poem: “If I could, I’d revive the sound of his voice caught on a few bargain cassettes / The accent of his generation driven from the villages of their birth / the bellowing of lung sacs of roosters squawking through the pebbled / alleys, the straw beds, the well-stubbled streets of mud and stone,” illustrate an effort to project the reader into a living past, those “well-stubbled streets” of the ancestors. Here and elsewhere, the reader feels a similar effort open a flood gate of both structure and surprise.
Headstone, an important title for the volume, leads us to the central six-part poem addressed to the father, beginning: “Five stones perch on the family headstone / Five stones each the size of a child’s fist.” Here, the narrator metaphorically stands at the gravesite summoning images of the father as a boy, a soldier, husband, physician, car-lover. Here, we are allowed to witness—with shocking intimacy and grace—the father’s death in a coronary care unit. The poem “Headstone” is a eulogy. It is also a reflection on the nature of memory: the lovely “I remember” and “I see you” refrains inviting smells, sights and sounds to rise up into consciousness and dissipate, beautiful, transient, heart-breaking. It is a reflection on how memory asserts itself at odd times, as if it had gathered and grown rich in the dark while waiting to burst out, or be summoned, as when singing the Kaddish.
We know Elber is a Rabbi. The prayerful, religious tenor of many of the poems is front and center. But we see the fact of his vocation referred to only indirectly, and generally only in relation to his father, such in the self-reflexive: “I am the son who takes God too seriously” and elsewhere, when the author “hears” the father ask when he is going to stop being “pathologically religious.” We see Elber marry in a religious ceremony at age 20, see him depict the Belzer Rebbbe’s dance in a wonderful third person account of a long destroyed Polish village, see him speak in biblical persona, but never see him preach as one who knows better due to his education and professional experience. Elber moves in and out of the poems as an equal, a careful and loving presence, a son, lover, friend, and fellow traveler.
I particularly loved “Family Secrets” in Section III as it successfully captures the complexity of the imaginative process. “Family Secrets” depicts his father’s agitation when the Nazi’s invade Poland, sees him “walking the night forests of forged identities and stolen lugers,” sees him “walking under moonlight / surviving on roots.” It also sees him watch “other Jews herded in a town square,” and later kiss parents goodbye and accept conscription (presumably as a surgeon) into the Russian army as a way of escaping his own annihilation. And though the title suggests the shame associated with family secrets, the poem never judges how his father “weighed the risks of capture and compliance.” Rather, there is profound empathy. We know from previous poems that the presence of beards, his grandfather’s (in “Beard”) and his own (“the dawn of my first stubble”) are connected to the speaker’s soul. We know that the act of shaving is seen as holy. We know that the father’s fiery red hair is reproduced in the son. Thus, we know that the gestures in the penultimate stanza, the father “Scraping whiskers from his face / leaving his copper hair open to the sky” as he is transported East, are descriptive and sympathetic, they enact the reasoning of the poem itself, its desire to keep the heart bareheaded, open to the sky.
Elber acknowledges the horror of war, how his paternal grandparents died in a massacre in 1941 and are buried in a mass grave, unmarked, bearing no headstone, having left no photographs, no physical trace in a country where “even the trees are gone are gone.” He honors these grandparents with love and humility, yet avoids rancor, the role of fellow-victim. Rather he bears witness, acknowledging the helplessness of those who died, and those who survived, all the while gathering the ghosts and blessing them. Headstone joins the author with his ancestors and parents in their sacrifice and unbearable pain, their silence and uncomfortable assimilation. It puts a powerful descriptive skill to work breathing a lost world back to life.
In “The Ingathering of Exiles” we learn that Elber was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War; that he spent some of that time in Israel, working as an aide in a hospital, reading leftist literature which he reasonably understood to be abhorrent to his father; that he found refuge in the counterculture of the 60’s with its openness and freedom; that his world-view diverged from that of his father in ways that caused them both stinging pain. We also see a coming of age, a celebration of first love, sexual encounters, four unforgettable friends, a time and place shadowed with the struggle to both please and differentiate from his father: “I am my father’s burnt library / I am my father’s letters / I am too much my father’s son.” In spite of the few places in which the narrator gets swept away as if with his own music and the many texts resonating in his ear, this, and the other long poems are cohesive, testamentary, gripping.
The poems in final section contain the wonderful “My Ex-Wedding,” a rare celebratory description of a first marriage ceremony that moves up and down the tonal register from the laugh-out-loud “Our father’s talking turkey / Our mothers speaking mink” to the thoughtful, “Did our bodies mean to become strangers so quickly after slowly / becoming friends.” I love this poem for its generosity and humor. It feels like a gift to so many.
Section V also includes poems about his own son that subtly reframe the prior sections. “Your Small Hands” and “Red Walls,” are simply told: “You began as a kiss in an English garden. / The nurse held you up.” The author has now become a father (“I hold your dancing hand in my father fingers”) who experiences his own son as “pulling me into tomorrow,” and himself as helpless to resist the transhistorical pressure through which the son trains the father’s attention on the future. These poems are jubilant. They are also aware of what the world has wrought, “splintered temples” (referring wonderfully to his own head and so much more), the “jugular world of competing anthems.” Thus, we treasure this child’s “hat of red mornings” as it captures with the power of metaphor a rich, colorful, past, a vulnerable present, and a unknown, unknowable future.
Victoria Korth
Victoria Korth is the recipient of the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, 2021 Streetlight Poetry prize, second place, and other prizes. Poems have appeared in Stone Canoe, Broad River Review, Ocean State Review, Tar River Poetry, LEON Literary Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Barrow Street and widely elsewhere. The author of two chapbooks, Cord Color, Finishing Line Press 2015, and Tacking Stitch 2022. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers and an MA in Creative Writing from SUNY Brockport. She lives in Western New York State where she is a practicing psychiatrist caring for the chronically mentally ill.