An Exploration of Love, Mortality and Decay

By Gary L. Myers

Landscapes and Architectures, Kendall Dunkelberg's first book of poetry (Florida Literary Foundation Press, 2001) is a collection of 59 poems, many of which address the desire to commune with the natural world or, at least, to unravel some of its mysteries.

Indeed, nearly every poem skillfully shows the way via the personal experiences of the author while living in Iowa, Texas, Illinois, Denmark and Mississippi. Very much poems of place, many stand as reminders that significance can be found in even the smallest events, as seen in "The Siren":

No more than a clump of feathers
after being pelted by last night's hail,
it only takes a little imagination
to resurrect the dead grackle in my yard
into a god, or half-god
even the sirens were half-human
and only their voices enchanted.

Here the poet's focus on a dead grackle conjures questions about our own mortality as we look upon the body of the bird and watch its slow demise under the influence of the elements and other creatures that seem to appear as loyal servants to the process:

The siren's song must be coupled
with the sound of rain that quenched
more than two month's drought
and finally gave her dried flesh
the chance to decompose.

and later:

even her fleas abandon her now,
as she is left to softer creatures
and carrion birds who slowly
will carry away her soul.

Dunkelberg's attention to the dismantling of the grackle through time works well to illustrate that the journey from life to death might appear slower than it actually is; indeed, it might seem excruciatingly slow as one waits through drought for the help of the rain. Moreover, the interaction between life and death, the known and unknown, the real and the mysterious, that appears in many of the other poems as well, is preserved in the last lines with carrion birds returning something of the grackle back to the sky, completing the cycle.

The fragility of life as a theme throughout this collection seems not only a point of contemplation, but a source of melancholy, as in the poem "The Fragility of Bodies." Here the poet questions his own vulnerability in a world where happenstance seems to lurk within the folds of time.

Time and time again
while I'm driving, someone
will step into the street
and I'll think, if I had passed
a few seconds sooner, I'd know
the fragility of bodies, how flesh
disintegrates on impact, bones
snap right before your eyes.

And time and time again
while walking or riding my bike
a shadow crosses quickly the
corner of my eye and I think,
if that had been a car I'd know
the fragility of my own body.

I don't really know these things.

Obsession might be too strong a word for Dunkelberg's interest in human mortality, but clearly this poet recognizes the nuances in life that suggest death, as in "The Silences" which is about his 94-year-old grandmother: "I try to write of silence / and realize the one who really knows it / is my grandmother." Here Dunkelberg's interest in mortality leads the reader toward the inevitable silence that awaits us all.

The question, of course, is how close can one come before being lost to the silence of death that we imagine. When asked near the end of the poem whether she will "come for a ride along the coast," the grandmother answers: "'Yes.' Hardly a whisper / an exhalation of breath across her tongue, / the only word she has spoken today."

Coming into close proximity with death, however, is not where this poet's vision ends. Indeed, several poems afford the reader the opportunity to experience the world from a spiritual point of view, as in "Song of the Carp," which begins:

Lying on the bank, my gills fill with mud,
my tongue rots, fragments of lips
hang from my teeth, and my eyes cloud
while staring across the river.

or in "Now That You've Gone," which begins:

I will come to you as nothing but a shadow
not pretensions of substance, just the sun
dipping below a mountain forming patterns
in the smoke that rises from your ashtray.

Other poems in the collection demonstrate the wide range of Dunkelberg's topics. For example, there are several relationship poems, set very much in the here and now, that negotiate love's complications with honesty and wit. One such poem is "Objects," which begins:

She didn't think we were made
for each other, her friend and I
I asked if she was in love with me.
That was my biggest problem then;
I was far too honest.
I should've asked if she were jealous

"In Your Apartment" and "Tie-Dye" similarly wind their way through shared experiences anchored by objects of imaginative value, such as a tie-dyed shirt, the colors and patterns of which turn out to represent an intense, yet complicated, relationship.

Landscapes and Architectures is a strong first hook of poems with excellent range and depth. A poet whose adept hand reveals affinities we all seek in the world, Kendall Dunkelberg's collection is "The stuff muses are made of."

Gary L. Myers is a professor of English at Mississippi State University. He has published two books of poetry, Lifetime Possessions and World Effects.