Laced with imaginative diction, acrobatic-yet-precise internal music, and figurative language, “Scarecrow” forecasts what is to come: a collection of musical, symbolic, and highly-structured narratives that tell Terry’s story in three, chronological sections: the first of his experiences with rejection as a homosexual boy in the South, the second of his tumultuous and often terrifying adolescence, and the third of the oddly-discomfiting peace he finds as an adult.

The first section’s primary tool is symbolism. In the title poem, for example, Terry observes a waxwing gathering berries from a holly only to pass “it to its neighbor, // who passes it in turn, and so on down the [telephone] wire” until each bird is fed. The boy internalizes such a notion of community when, at the poem’s center, he “fantasizes / that kids in his class break into song // and dance like fools in an old musical.” Two poems later in “They were Call Colored,” Terry’s first gay lover (one of the blacks who works the farm next door to his home) slays a copperhead. When Terry inspects its body a few days later, he finds it writhing with maggots: “The snake was dead, but thousand of little white lives // wouldn’t let it rest.” Similarly, in “Flattened Penny,” “Lincoln’s face [is] erased” by a train, the penny “thin as a holy wafer, transformed by the weight // and might of the Southern Rail.” In “Photograph, 1984” Terry imagines a snake he’s watched eat a blackbird become the blackbird itself. And, finally, in “Since they put you out,” even inanimate objects reject Terry whose family has just rejected him: “no chair receives you, / no bath invites you, / no stove pot simmers / you to supper…” The primary message carried by these symbols are of rejection and for a desire to invert one’s sexual orientation, not to reject the self but to undo (much like the blackbird and snake) whatever action has made Terry who he is.

The poems of the second section merge Terry’s symbolic, boy-hood narratives with highly-organized structural subtext in poems about his adolescence as an exile. In “He Comes to Oak Island,” the speaker observes an “ibis dabbl[ing] in madly / in the wet sand” after he’s learned he is HIV positive and wonders “whose name its inscribing // in the Book of the Dead.” Similarly, “Elegy Written in November,” eulogizes the death of Terry’s friend David via disjointed sections each with their own form and title. And the last (perhaps best) poem of the section, “Snow falls in Hartsville,” is a contemporary sonnet sequence that depicts Terry’s attempt to reject his homosexuality and have a relationship with a girl who turns out to be gay herself. Unlike most sequences of this sort, Terry daisy-chains each sonnet to the last by mirroring the final line of each sonnet in the next. This structure creates a cyclical effect that reminds us of the inversion of the snake and blackbird in “Photograph, 1984.” This poem’s message, however, is entirely different. By the end of “Snow falls in Hartsville,” Terry accepts who he is, the girl he once tried to love is now “the man she was always meant to be,” and he has accepted his fate.

In the third and final section, we encounter less symbolic, less structural, more direct poems about domestic life. They are direct for a reason: Terry now has a partner, a career, and a passion that fulfills him; life since his adolescence has settled in, and the objects in his world (be they living or inanimate) no longer teem with implication. Things simply are what they are, and Terry seems a bit restless with his new rank. He’s not unhappy, but he does seem a bit unsure how to proceed in his life and work. In “Landscaper’s Curse,” for example, Terry can’t help but critique the “well-kept bungaloes / … / painted in colors that intimate / quirky wines in wrought-iron racks…” even though he is surrounded by beauty In “A Rumor of Fire,” though Terry and his a partner have bought a home together (“two bedrooms, one bath, a narrow living / room— all we could afford”) he realizes he’s “never lived / in a house I have loved.” And, in “Lost,” he says

….my lover fell asleep
on the couch again
last night and did not come
to bed. Nothing to do
with fighting, no anger,
just a decade or so since first love,
and now too much work,
and the fact that I’ve begun to snore
like an old man.

The collection ends more hopefully with “Everything is Possible,” a poem that, much like a villanelle, cycles through a series of repeated, internally rhyming lines that declare “in this room of open windows… exists another window / across your knees” and “in this world of open screens, nearly everything / can be remembered.” While Terry may be restless, life is all around him and, perhaps, the poem declares “…Though some memories, / you know, are lost, misfiled, because … / …this librarian, like you, is sometimes distracted / by music and by luminous updates from the future.”

Waxwings is a wonderfully constructed and brave collection of poems. It takes the reader on a journey not only through Terry’s life but into a culture that that has such a difficult time accepting those who are different. While most of these poems tell stories, they deftly employ a lyricism and subtext that make for a beautiful and intriguing read. Given Terry’s subject matter, he could easily have settled for poems of extreme story or of extreme lyricism and experimentation. In a time in which contemporary poetry seems to pick one or the other, Terry chose in Waxwings to bring these approaches together. He has done brilliantly so.

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Garrett Hongo once called Hummer ‘s poetry “a hectoring witness compelled to translate the banal urban atrocities of our current civilization into complex testimonies and transcendent prophecies.” Hummer’s tenth collection of verse, Ephemeron (published with LSU Press’s Southern Messenger Poetry Series in 2011) may be his most oracular yet. With its host of defunct genomes, a rupturing cosmos, malevolent gods, a derelict body politic, and endless war, the poems in this collection act as harbingers of the wasteland America may soon become.

Much of Ephemeron merges the mistakes of the past, the present, and (what Hummer imagines) the future will bring into a highly fictionalized but disturbingly realistic future. Take “System,” for example, in which a geneticist is sliced open to reveal “a schematic of precise and interlocking logic / So familiar that the men with bayonets stepped back…” or the similarly eerie “Inventory” which opens:
 

  Hogsheads from the provinces. Bundles from caravans.
                 Crude crates from the holds of ships. Urns of oil and wine.
            Embroidered sacks of opium tied shut with silk twine.
                  Thirty slaves. Women: eight. Men: nine. Sundry children.
            And on the farthest dock, a pile of junk: cracked cudgels, broken
                   bandoliers, body armor stained, punctured, and stove in…

Hummer takes the notion of personae to a new level in this book. Unlike his previous work, in which his poems are written from the point-of-view of an imagined character or from his own, Ephemeron combines these points-of-view to create a future self navigating the wasteland and recording what he encounters.

Similar to Walt Whitman in Hell and the books that have followed, Ephemeron is sequenced like a book-length poem rather than a collection of random verse gathered in a single place. It relies more on repetition and the compounding and coordination of visuals, locales, characters, and structures to tell its story. Many of the poems are lists of lengthy, acrobatic prose couplets separated by an asterisk. Here are the first few sections of “Biography of Eros”:
 

The witnessing of things in the mind. But what mind? The lovers lay on the
bed, handcuffed, saying Please, and just for a moment one of them knew.
*
Sleeping, one of them moaned. It was the dream of the interpenetration of
souls. Death is in everything, crystalline arsenic dissolved in alcohol.
*
They wore raptor masks. One used a small flexible whip. Its marks were
radiant traces of ichor. Thus the walls of the sanctum were broken.

These lyrics act like monologues or solo riffs, utilizing image and imagination to carve out a space in the book that’s almost pure voice. These poems are rather unique to Hummer’s verse, which rarely uses the prose line or is so violently elliptical. But Hummer doesn’t get seduced by these highly musical lists, bringing more familiar narrative poems into the fold in order to anchor the collection and its reader. The title poem, for example, addresses the infinite smallness of life and the miracle of life— regardless of cynicism— with simple but wildly imaginative lines. A poem about a middle-aged father about to become a father all over again, “Ephemeron” opens:

Those are windflowers glowing in the outer darkness
    just beyond the gateposts. If I squint,
I see them clearly: white windflowers, flicker of star gas,
    bridal-veil nebula— an infinity bent
By the gravity of dawn and rain, but opening.
    It astonishes me again: I am fifty and pregnant,
And beyond the bedroom window September is gathering
    Its cosmological light.

“Ephemeron” is also a poem about god, fate, and that which makes up the physical and metaphysical human body: “it is they who assemble, in the amniotic sac, / Bits of star-grit, skeins of DNA, the holy chemistry / Of existence.” Hummer has always been concerned with the building blocks of reality and how they affect our behavior in the world. In some of the best poems in Ephemeron, this fascinations leads to a captivating convergence of the concrete and abstract. Take “Fallacy of Composition,” for example, which begins: “The sky darkens with flying bodies: the extinct birds / live in the mind, therefore the birds live. / The color of the day deepens with memory.  All the wreckage / of history is eclipsed.” and goes on to list images of various undoings: “The blacksmith raises his hammer / and the red hot horseshoe straightens into an iron bar. / Consciousness moves like a shadow through the forest / and whole peoples are restored.” 
 
“Fallacy of Composition” represents one of the central themes of the book: our longing to undo the mistakes we’ve made, to reverse what has made the world such a hazardous place to live in. Global warming, terrorism, political unrest, the stagnant economy: these issues have become a popular subject of contemporary American poetry with books like Rodney Jones’ Apocalyptic Narrative, Carolyn Forche’s The Angel of History, Brian Henry’s Quarantine, and Robert Wrigley’s Beautiful Country. Ephemeron is pre-apocalyptic vision that fearlessly examines where we are, where we’ve been, and where (Hummer believes) we are likely to end up. Ephemeron, most of all, is a beautiful entreaty to the 21st Century, to “a god’s favorite trick— / the accrual, like money in the bank, of our undoing.” “Now that all the people have vanished,” he asks in “Ad Hominem,” “who will deal / with the swarm of tiny annoyances that defined / Human existence? … What god will try / to train the cat to shake its head and curse?”

Read “The Last Meal of the Iceman,” a Rumpus Original Poem by T.R. Hummer, Day 4 of our 2012 National Poetry Month Project.

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