Current Issue: Spring/Summer 2011

Panic by Laura McCullough   
Alice James Books, 2011. $15.95 $14.95.

Review by Melanie Jordan

Laura McCullough’s fourth collection of poetry drops us into a terrarium-like ecosystem on the real Jersey Shore. In a uniquely American idiom, the poems occupy liminal spaces between work and sacrifice, heroism and failure, responsibility and negligence. Among those shaded binaries, the inhabitants of these poems play out their lives and their small mercies.

The linchpin of the collection is the Lifeguard, an unnamed young man, functioning simultaneously as symbol, compass, and anti-hero. He is not the bronzed Adonis he might wish to be; instead, the drowning of a child (though not technically on his watch) galvanizes a lingering inadequacy. His “insufficiency,” his acceptance of “the true meaningless of guardianship” often wells up in the other inhabitants of the book -- mothers, fathers and workers unable to prevent misfortune (62). He is a sign of removable authority and confidence; in “The Necessity of Fire,” he is equivalent to “underbrush” ripe for burning (29). The “savior” resides at the bottom of the hierarchy and feels paradoxically inferior to bystanders. The book repeatedly echoes this masculine impotence -- the gravely injured construction worker in the first poem is another example. In this way, the Lifeguard opens up a talking point of the book – he is a societal indicator, a hub around which many of the other inhabitants may be charted. He is like the lamentable gutted shark, usually respected and feared, in “Along the Surface.” In the latter poem, droves of people appear, happy to carry parts of the eviscerated creature away --- when the Lifeguard saves a little girl at one point, however, no one shows up. This disparity illustrates just one way the book takes on complex societal commentary. The implications of the collection sneak up on you; because of tight sequencing and remarkably steady language, the larger meditations work their ways to you without excessive or unseemly editorializing on McCullough’s part.

That’s not to say that the book is too well-mannered. It comments wryly on acceptable social expression. For example, the Lifeguard knows he’s smart because he thinks he appreciates irony. The truth-and-beauty-loving crowd (i.e. poets?) in the Dolphinhead lounge near the end of the book is seething with resentment: when a patron expresses “Only what dies is exquisite,”

The others silently mocked him —
no one so easily satisfied anymore,
wanting instead something perfectly imperfect,
the potentially dangerous,
permission
to display anger in public. (51)

Touché. This poem gave me a funny feeling, like I’m one of the jerks the narrator is talking about. Interestingly, the jab won my admiration. I seek the juxtaposition of the “perfectly imperfect,” and I’ve found it in Panic. Given the book’s modus operandi, it seems likely that McCullough is jabbing at herself as well. This book seeks permission to show the cruel and ugly without becoming ugly. It succeeds, certainly. Its shifts in perspective are skillful even though risky (the opening lines of “Wind and Water, a Drowning,” a presumption of the drowning child’s consciousness, made me momentarily uncomfortable). McCullough turns an Elizabeth Bishop-like laserbeam on the citizens of the shore as their small desires morph into big ones and they labor at the horizon of water and land. Here at this traditionally mystical scrim, strange things do happen, but all the tragedy and near-tragedy is part of the unavoidable human drama. Malleable pronouns and amplified nominative usage of “what” (“Gravity and What Works Against It, What Needs to Be Done,” “What He Did With His Hands,” etc.) indicate avenues for applying conditions to more than one object or character in the poems as well as opportunities to expand and classify. In terms of technique and style, this affords McCullough plenty of room to move laterally and gel the whole web of motifs in the book. Those recurring images (bleach, the human body as a “basket”, iPods, dying marine life, etc.) cement the book and contribute to an image narrative that is always simultaneously ripe for disaster and affirmation of life. The power of the book often lies in those images and in the willingness to write “real” people who are not always flatteringly portrayed. McCullough does not condescend to her characters, nor does she flatter them, poised as they are on the cusps of disaster and the cusps of moving forward each moment. Panic’s possession of mediated joy is joy nonetheless; its “strange intimacies” pull us toward the final gesture of the book, a peaceful moment in the midst of turmoil, a respite as “tender and grave/ as a kiss” (44).