The Fire Lit & Nearing by J.G. McClure 

​Charles Rammelkamp
​

“The Fire Lit & Nearing”
Poetry
Indolent Books, 2018
$14.99, 78 pages
ISBN: 978-1-945023-09-5 
 
The title of J.D. McClure’s first collection of poems comes from a poem toward the end called “I Want to Light a Book of Matches”:
and think how true: the scrape & bloom,
 
bright phosphorous. Wood unweaving
to heat & smoke.
 
To feel this is how it was, yes:
the fire lit & nearing
 
Underlying all the hilarity and inventiveness of the poems that lead up to this is a deep meditation – a la Kierkegaard, a la Keats, a la Goethe – of that “it,” a love that didn’t work out, whose pain and heartbreak seem in retrospect as inevitable as the death of the man tied to the tracks while the freight train bears down on him.
 
Or is it?
 
So many of these astoundingly imaginative poems consider alternatives that may be no less plausible than any other, in a weird, science-fiction-y originality. Take the opening poem, “The Odyssey II,” a sort of overture to the poems that follow. Odysseus’ return to Ithaca may not be so happily-ever-after as Homer seems to portray it in his epic poem, after all. He’s ruined the island’s economy, misses his adventures at sea. His great yearning to be reunited with Penelope doesn’t stand up to the fact of that reunion: “And what is Penelope beside The Idea / of Penelope, for whom he longs.” Maybe, the reader infers, the same can be said about “Ellie,” the muse of this collection.
 
Indeed, the first poem of the first section, “Multiverse Theory,” is a riff on the classic random accident where somebody is hit by a bus. Its sheer randomness opens up a Pandora’s Box of alternatives.
 
There are worlds as real as this one for every way we never meet:
worlds where you get hit by a bus instead, or I do,
worlds where you are the one
driving the bus and the squishy
whistling noise I make as
I’m sucked under the wheels haunts you
so that you never drive a bus again, you become
a lobbyist against unsafe busing practices,
you symbolically bury the fenders of retired buses
in tasteful but under-attended twilight ceremonies you imagine
the man you hit with the bus would really have liked.
And there are others in which you find a way
not to think about any of that,
and instead keep driving the same bus for years, many years.
 
And that’s not all! “There are of course worlds in which buses were never invented, /
in which humans were never invented….” So the gist of the poems in The Fire Lit & Nearing trends, with delightful surprise and startling wit. Except that in this “real” world, we understand, his heart was broken. That’s the rock-hard reality of this world.
 
The very titles of so many of these sad poems nevertheless bring a smile, as do the poems themselves: “Nothing Will Be All Right, but Thank You Anyway,” “The Transience of All Things Walks into a Bar,” “Self Portrait as Ego and Vehicle,” “Portrait of My Longings as a B Movie Script,” “He’d Be Happier, He Thinks, if He Could Hate the World Purely,” “Ellie, Who Swore She Could Never Replace You, Has a New Lover and You Want to Hear All About Him.” (But you really don’t: the poem is about Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s The Birds, whose fate, like the characters in any horror film, we dread watching unfold on film, flinching as she opens the attic door. Don’t Do It! we inwardly scream, Don’t Do It!)
 
One of the cleverest poems is one entitled “Chaos Is Seattle in a Spaniel.” It’s another riff on alternative endings, on unforeseen possibilities: 
 
is what my phone thinks
I’m saying when I say
 
¿que haces si hablo
en español? It doesn’t
 
understand Spanish--
or anything, really: only
 
knows to chart and check
my voice against a constellation
 
of blinking algorithms and
preprogrammed phrases that,
thirty years ago, would’ve
been science fiction,
 
and still are, to me--
even though I know
 
the phone doesn’t know it,
it’s not exactly wrong
 
about chaos, about the whirling
incomprehensible city
 
of veins and thought and cells
that make a spaniel,
 
that make me,
that make the people
who made the phone able
to stitch my scattered
 
sounds together and
give me an answer
 
to a question I didn’t
know I’d asked.
 
“What do you do if I speak Spanish?” Indeed.
 
McClure’s poems are full of animals in a zany, fantastic way, like something out of fables, parables. “At Mason Park in December, I Think About the Passing Year” begins, “Chekhov said never put a loaded goose on stage / unless someone’ll fire it before the play is done.” The poem goes on to weave elements of storytelling with the birds. “The Cat” is a fantasy of a cat that brings back mice and birds to its owners, but then next it’s a deer the cat brings, then an SUV… The poem concludes with what feels almost like a moral:  “Weeping, doomed, we lay out her favorite treats. In the end there’s only love.” Pigs are central to “Write a Dream, Lose a Reader,” spiders to “Sonnet,” ants to “A Nature Poem,” rats to “Ars Poetica.”
 
But for all this charming playfulness and the impressive intelligence at work in these poems, the naked hungers and heartbreaks at the bottom of the “performance” are truly affecting. This is a stunning and beautiful collection.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



 

About the Author: 
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Jack Tar’s Lady Parts, is available from Main Street Rag Publishing. Another poetry chapbook, Me and Sal Paradise, was recently published by FutureCycle Press, and an e-chapbook, "Time Is on My Side (yes it is)" was just published by Liquid Light - http://poetscoop.org/manuscrip/Time%20Is%20on%20My%20Side%20FREE.pdf

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