Travis Mossotti. About the Dead. Utah State University Press, 2011.
Reviewed by Avni Vyas
In About the Dead, winner of Utah State University’s May Swenson Poetry Award, Travis Mossotti's poems display a range of lyricism and acrobatics that tackle the levity and gravitas of the everyday. Mossotti’s language, form and sound push against the reader's expected map of contemporary verse. Readers are guided through a mountain landscape, a family history, small towns, Appalachia, and also the bright, unexpected pockets of language, which offer as much clarity as they do mirth.
The book’s preamble, "Decampment," locates the reader in South Carolina by the voice of a man who grew up in a forest populated by animals, streams, and ghosts. Through "Decampment," Mossotti introduces his readers to the landscape the book will traverse, rewrite, and eventually transform. "The first night, I thought a woman was getting raped, but by the third, my father had me holding the light while he loaded the buckshot." The absent screech owl—like the work of many poems in the collection—is freeing, is indeed, as the father says, "a ghost leaving."
In
the first section, "Country of Forgotten Languages," the poems’ speakers make
their home in the strange, familiar and macabre. The land is made by
inheritance, by layering: "Offspring of the offspring of the offspring / of crows cross over the
thistle and brush." In it, we see the land named by its inhabitants, present
and gone, in close conversation. "If the drone and flicker of a gathering
storms should disrupt / the silence of the room," Mossoti writes of character
Ernie Watts’s wife, "she’ll tighten the wing nut of her body behind his, so
closer that when her lips / brush against the…hairs on the back of his neck
he’ll be convinced there is no other life but this." In this way, the
characters and the scenery marry to each other, allowing the Tennessee hills
just as much stage presence as the people who live there.
In
the second section, the title poem "About the Dead," twins sharp observations of
death’s systematic procession with the same systematic fervor of being alive. "The plagues were so efficient / at producing bones to stack," the speaker says
of the catacombs in Paris, where, later, after he witnesses a couple caught in
lusty throes on Jim Morrison’s grave, he remarks of the man’s unfulfilled
desires, "something still locked up inside him." The work of the second section
strengthens the speaker’s authority, and the reader gets the pleasure of moving
through the tender ("The hospital will quiet tonight / to a morphine
drip...morgue freezer, little chapel, / loved ones bent in awkward prayer.") to
the terrific ("An old lover galloped past like an oversized orgasm") and it is
this movement toward the fantastic, the neon use of language, that extends past
the landscape of Tennessee to the multi-layered imaginary.
In "Saxifrage," a boxing gym becomes the setting for a
revenge meditation. The repetitive "Thump, Wham!" of punches echoes in semiotic
lists ("Sweet grass, duckweed / tupelo, box wood, juniper, box wood, juniper," and then "Picasso. Latrine. Homunculus. / Filch.") creates an aural and sensory
tapestry of frustration itself. The revenge becomes secondary to the sweat,
and the reader, like the speaker, moves word by word through the process.
In the final section, Mossotti brings the reader full circle, away from the jail cells and graveyards, to the mundane, in "I Watched Her Going Into the Gas Station" where a sexy lust-object reminds the other gas station patrons of the immortality granted by youth—"hips rocking like a pendulum—hips with a purpose." The lustful speaker (choked, it seems, by the woman's "six splendid inches of midriff,") reminds the reader not unkindly that the imagination, it seems, is the safe place for the dangerous and the vibrant. "Watching … them made me and everyone else there/ feel that much older, our lives and our Toyota Tercels/ that much more pointless."
Here, About the Dead breaks beyond the expected trope of a speaker engaged in self-discovery. Here, Mossotti brings readers into experiencing the poem sound by sound, leaf by leaf, into a collision of verve and landscape. Through the sections, readers can see Mossotti layering landscape on top of color. Awe is as present as anger. Readers get it all. If Mossotti wants readers to have a taste of a first book collection, then he prepares a feast.
Travis Mossotti received a BA in English and French from Webster University and an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. A faculty lecturer at the University of California-Santa Cruz, his poetry appears widely in literary journals, including American Literary Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Cream City Review, New York Quarterly, Passages North, RHINO, Southern Humanities Review, and many others.
Avni Vyas lives and works in Tallahassee, FL. Her work has appeared in Juked, River Styx, Meridian, Crab Orchard Review, and others.