Chuck Kramer Reviews
If It Comes to That
By Marc Frazier
…
Marc Frazier is a poet who often ends a poem with a bombshell—a turn of phrase, an insight, or even a question. His skill at producing powerful endings is one of the delights of reading his work in If It Comes to That, his fourth book of poems, this one from Kelsay books. In “Kahlo” he asks, “Who is who they wanted to become?” In “The Discovery” he ends by stating “…our adolescent lives move on. Always move on. And not much is learned.” In “Journal of the Plague Years: One,” he concludes: “I was the river once. He was the sea.”
These poems wrestle with questions of identity, elitism and privilege, life and death, especially death, as they engage in a constant conversation with the arts. Some begin with a poetic epigraph while others reference movies, painting and art. This gives the poems a large canvas to explore as they deal with both contemporary issues and the dark, lonely corners of Frazier’s personal family history.
In that history he looks for answers, often from people who can’t speak, as in “To Grandmothers Deceased Before My Birth.” Yes, the dead are always with him and he’s filled with dread of his own death. Three poems grouped together —”The Visit,” “Pasture of Dead Horses” and “Gathering,”— present these concerns with sharp focus.
Underlaying all this is his identity as a gay man which he openly explores, presenting the many facets of its reality in poems like “The Blind Leading the Blind” about auto repair with his dad and “Weekly Ritual,” his lament for all the gossip and feminine intimacies he missed because his mom and sisters never went to a beauty parlor.
What is a real pleasure in reading Frazier is his formal dexterity. While most of the poems are free verse, there are also prose poems, a villanelle, a pantoum, and an unusual attempt to wring poetry from pages of material heavy with redactions. “bulletproof blanket” starts with a sales promo from the manufacturer and “The Reward” is Frazier’s reworking of a statement by Boston bomber Tsarnaev. Given the difficult nature of the material he started with, Frazier achieves limited, mixed results here.
Far more vibrant are those poems conceived as conversations with the arts: film (“Indochine”), paintings (“Rivera” and “Little Nude by Table”), and poetry itself by many authors such as Plath, Oliver, Williams, and Gallagher. Some are full of admiration while others are full of questions but each provides a new slant on the work of other artists.
“Journal of the Plague Years: One and Two” are a pair of poems full of sadness and loss, histories of a love gone awry and the ephemeral nature of human experience. These same themes also run through “If It Comes to That,” which ends by asking the question, “In the deafening dusk, do I fit in us?”
The book ends with “Incident on the Green Line” which explodes first in violence and then in unexpected optimism. Like the rest of the collection, it doesn’t shy away from contemporary reality but isn’t overwhelmed by it either, and that is what makes this book an important assemblage of incisive, well-crafted poems.
If It Comes To That by Marc Frazier
Kelsay Books/September 2023
Cover painting by Steven Ostrowski
113 pages
Reviewed by Chuck Kramer
As It Ought To Be 