Review: Snow in New Yorkby Matthew Brennan

Tipton Poetry Journal – Summer 2021

Review: Snow in New Yorkby Matthew Brennan

Reviewed by Dan Carpenter

Title: Snow in New York

Author: Matthew Brennan

Year: May, 2021 Publisher: Lamar University Literary Press

The title work of Matthew Brennan’s sixth book of poetry serves as a handy sampler of preoccupations that have distinguished his work for more than four decades: storytelling, graphic description, blindsiding metaphor, personification of nature, a keen (if nomadic) sense of place and a gallant shouldering of tristesse marked foremost by family lamentation.

Brennan’s place these days is Columbus, Ohio; but he spent 32 years teaching at Indiana State University, and that western Indiana milieu receives its due among the 102 entries in Snow in New York: New and Selected Poems. So do a spate of other stops revisited in a collection that represents Brennan’s life from early childhood onward – San Francisco, St. Louis, Minneapolis, England and the ancestral Ireland among them.

“Snow in New York,” the next-to-last of the 21 new poems, is one of several poignant glimpses into Brennan’s brother’s struggle with the cancer that took his young life. It’s winter, the poet has come to the big city to accompany the patient across town to treatment, and shares the frustration of finding the car by morning encased in ice “like a great glacier / never thawed.”

. . . You struck and clawed and quarreled with the cold, stony block, a sculptor scorned by his hard-hearted muse . . .

When he cares to, Brennan can depict natural surroundings with a worshipper’s delicacy, reveling in how the wind

. . . animates the higher limbs, lifts them

Enough to let a slant of light slip through

Their folded hands and land on each green leaf

And me, the trees translucent as stained glass. More often, our uneasy relationship with the non-human environment, and its correspondence to human relations, prompt a less congenial picture. The lovers in “Picnic in Iowa” might have stayed in their car and pretended “The puddles of tar-black mud and mounds of brush” were a little patch of Eden, just as Manet limned his idyllic portrait of the Seine on a day the river “reeked, a dung-filled barn.” On another famous river, at St. Louis, the poet’s grandfather, weary from double work shifts at a hospital during the Great Depression, stripped to his underwear and dove in, only to encounter “a ring of turds” and realizing “this down-and-out decade / was not about to let him go.”

We make the best of it. We strive to see beyond the grim circumstances that are going to defeat us. There’s heroism in that, as well as an invitation to pity. So it was for several family members and other intimates, in addition to his brother, whom Brennan memorializes in mostly-narrative pieces that appear in roughly equal distribution, chronology-wise, across this 40-plus-year oeuvre. His father, an object of fear as well as sorrow and fascination, is “like me, abruptly glad to be / alive, right now” as his lung cancer relents in one poem, then comes to the end of a miraculous stint of survival in another, “His boat, capsized in cold, uncharted waters,” finally shattered to bits.

Brennan’s gift for the elegiac applies to his marital, as well as filial, life, though the element of divorce (he is happily in a second marriage) injects some tonal cacophony here and there. Between you and me, I know as much as I care to about the ex with the “poisoned voice” who hates the poet’s “goddamned guts.” More poetic, if you will, is one called “The Gravity of Love,” in which

Ten years ago, at Heathrow Airport, our bodies

Touched, like the orbits of two planets, coming

Together at last, guided since creation

By the gravity of love. Now we’re apart.

You have your own space. But still, at night,

Above the dark that hides to dead trees

And the scarred fields upturned like graves

The same stars shine light-years away. To be sure, Brennan’s body of work ranges far beyond the personal, displaying an easygoing worldliness and erudition that accommodate his peculiar lyrical and philosophical riffs on history, culture and (sparingly) politics. His extensive writing about art and artists is well represented here, notably Grant Wood and J.M.W. Turner as well as Manet. He has a knack for worming inside the heads and hearts of historical figures such as Turner, Manet and William Hazlitt and Thomas Merton, the latter two of whom he channels to explore their love affairs. It’s good fun, much of it; yet never frivolous, never less than reverent for the lives and the life that draw this disarmingly approachable teacher-poet’s attention.

Matthew Brennan is the author of six books of poetry and four of criticism. He has published poems and articles in many journals, including Poetry Ireland Review, Sewanee Review and The New York Times Book Review. His many honors include the Theodore Dreiser Distinguished Research and Creativity Award and the Thomas Merton Center Prize for Poetry of the Sacred. His 2009 poetry collection, The House with the Mansard Roof, was a finalist for Best Books of Indiana. He formerly taught poetry writing and Romanticism at Indiana State University. He resides in Columbus, Ohio.

Dan Carpenter is a board member of Brick Street Poetry Inc. and the author of two collections of poetry and two books of non-fiction. He has contributed poems and stories to many journals and anthologies. He blogs at dancarpenterpoet.wordpress.com.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Summer 2021

Editor

Barry Harris is editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and three anthologies by Brick Street Poetry: Mapping the Muse: A Bicentennial Look at Indiana Poetry; Words and Other Wild Things and Cowboys & Cocktails:Poems from the True Grit Saloon. He has published one poetry collection, Something At The Center.

Married and father of two grown sons, Barry lives in Brownsburg, Indiana and is retired from Eli Lilly and Company.

His poetry has appeared in Kentucky Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Grey Sparrow, Silk Road Review, Saint Ann‘s Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Boston Literary Magazine, Night Train, Silver Birch Press, Flying Island, Awaken Consciousness, Writers‘ Bloc, Red-Headed Stepchild and Laureate: The Literary Journal of Arts for Lawrence. One of his poems was on display at the National Museum of Sport and another is painted on a barn in Boone County, Indiana as part of Brick Street Poetry‘s Word Hunger public art project. His poems are also included in these anthologies: From the Edge of the Prairie; Motif 3: All the Livelong Day; and Twin Muses: Art and Poetry. He graduated a long time ago with a major in English from Ball State University.