David Rigsbee
Waking Past Midnight: Selected Poems
By Floyd Collins
Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2023. 120 pages.
While he is probably best known as one of our more judicious essayists and chroniclers of contemporary poetry (over 60 reviews in The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, The Georgia Review, etc.), what is not so well known is that Floyd Collins is a poet of admirable reach, capable of both upholstered rhetoric and compelling atmospherics. His new collection, Waking Past Midnight: Selected Poems, provides ample evidence of these virtues, and while it may not invert the placement of his critic/poet hat, the volume reminds me that we have not mislaid the recipe for the kind of image-rich poems found in work by Miller Williams or Richard Hugo. Modest heft notwithstanding (it barely crosses the hundred page mark), Waking Past Midnight is Collins’ bid to be read in light of such company.
The collection opens with a series of poems marked by their delicacy of approach and their elegiac tinge. Doffing his hat at the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti, he writes,
I would give you dominion
over a wave in a wheat field,
I would have you know the cry
of a whippoorwill in the branches
of a lonely birch grove
just at twilight.
Here the only angels are limestone,
lost among the marble chessmen
on the churchyard lawn.
And yet your elegies have consoled me
at the grave
of my own father.
As a genre, the elegy has in common with the mission of music the fact that it confronts the permanent bulwark of silence like no other. The gloves off, an elegy raises too late into exaltation. Come to think of it, too late attaches itself to right now, demanding squatter’s rights in the ear of silence, almost as if silence could be a figure and the poet an allegorist. What Collins does here is this: he overlays the template for an elegy (Alberti’s elegy for Fernando Villalon)—one which he only refers to but doesn’t quote—finding application “at the grave/ of my own father.” It’s not an elegy itself, but certainly it understands the inescapable nature of that rubric.
The lovely “The Scarecrow” owes something to Issa in its indirection and clarity. Aside from its agricultural utility, the scarecrow (and later, a snowman) also reminds us of its inverse relationship with the doll. The latter attracts; the former repels. Both mirror aspects of their makers. In Collins’ poem, the scarecrow also signifies duty and vigilance. He looks like a crucifix, but the association doesn’t stick for this:
… there is no
Crown of thorns for this tattered guardian
Of the rattling stalks.
Speaking of effigies, in “Ghost of the Coal Miner” a snowman, newly made by boney miners’ children, glares with anthracite eyes “black with reproach.” Again, the obdurate word (“reproach)” hints how our innocence fades before ordinary attrition with the growing knowledge that silence and the néant surrounding years have as much claim to being the usual as any person does, not just the self-aware poet. It seems as if, with poems, we must manage our confinements as expertly as the endless frames of daily life.
He takes up the subject of mirrors more directly in “The Glassblower,” which begins,
His contempt for the power
of mirrors
grows as he ages.
The glassblower of course is a stand-in for the poet. His scorn for his own power expands as a result of his awareness that he doesn’t stand apart from the possible consequences of his craft. It’s a humbling Oppenheimer feeling in which the danger(s) to which he might be complicit pulls up equal to the initial wonder with which he presumably started with in the first place:
And he has the dream
every night,
the young girl
who opens the dark veins of her wrists
with a broken angel.
If consolation can be had, it comes in small and private portions (“What little he keeps for himself/ goes into cabinets.”).
It’s hardly surprising that childhood shows up in these wistful opening poems, often offering balance to others in which death makes its barrier to discourse and lyric alike. “The Death of Georg Trakl (1887-1914)” for example, is followed by “The Tree House,” in which the speaker climbs up into his remembered arboreal retreat, almost as if reimagining bliss as a guilty pleasure (“I wait well past midnight;/ It wouldn’t do to be seen.”). He has also climbed up, it seems, to ask himself whether innocence characterizes anything other than naivete. At the same time, he is aware that a real child sleeps below in his room. Alter ego? Avatar? We don’t know, but it could be an instance of split consciousness of the kind Roethke came to own: the older observing the younger, the former adding his almost skeptical readjustment:
I step out onto the planks.
Dark currents of wind move the branches
below my feet,
a child turns in his sleep:
some stranger is stealing his ship.
Blake schooled us about childhood, how the teaching comes after the fact, and he posits the hope—which sometimes takes the form of a lament—that we can sometimes reembody its eager wonderment, but then, in the back of the mind comes Eliot intoning “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” Knowledge, in Eliot’s parlance, amounts to a kind of embodiment, but does the possibility for forgiveness arise because we aren’t strong enough to undo what our bodies have experienced, un-see what we’ve seen? Or is the question defiantly rhetorical? Collins’ poems don’t offer an answer, nor should they.
But just as the alliance between children and the poet begins to take final shape, so do its implications. In “The Priest and the Toad,” we encounter a drowned girl whose tangled hair includes toad spawn, and “Of all children, this was the one he [the priest] loved.” The relationship between the girl and the priest is left deliberately ambiguous, although hints are tossed, and the suggestion of the priest as a toad becomes more vivid by the end:
Now not even the bellying church organ
Could roll the stone from her grave.
Tonight, in blue clay where the worm
Works out a destiny of its own,
Her fresh plot exhales one toadstool.
The middle section of Waking Past Midnight consists of narrative poems whose theme, roughly, is a close look at the siege of the Alamo, which bring to light the deaths of two heroes enshrined in the lore of Americana, Jim Bowie and Davey Crockett. Before we pause and scratch our heads at such moss-covered subject, consider that there might be an ulterior motive. In the first place, I get the impression Collins is all-in with the idea that he’s in fact writing an epic, an American epic, along the lines of Pound’s definition that the genre requires “a long poem including history.” It’s long been the tradition that the epic represents the poet’s summit and moreover that it comes after a poet’s having shown success with the lesser genres, like the elegy. Although I’ve long thought that nothing surpasses the elegy as a frame, in which resurrecting the remains slumped against silence enacts the translation from private musing to public experience, the epic zooms all the way out, temporally, spatially, and thematically. It’s the heroic answer, you might say, to elegy’s specificity. What Collins brings to the table is an attempt to articulate details with that same specificity, and in this he succeeds impressively. While the first third of this retrospective we read poems characterized by understatement and implication. With the Alamo poems, it’s the other way around, as articulation pins down what otherwise would be left to the reader. I remember reading about these literary poles in Roland Barthes way back in the day and revisiting them again in a fine and user-friendly essay by Reynolds Price, who contrasts Milton’s approach to Hemingway’s. The former nails description, while the latter is content to let readers do the job, after he’s pointed them in the right direction. One imposes, the other invites participation. In the Alamo poems, Collins opts for the former to great effect, and he gets into it right away:
From the shoals of Bowie’s blear-eyed fever
Wade the Aldama chasseurs, pompoms nodding
Above black leather shakos like cattails
Along the Louisiana bayou.
I had to be reminded what a shako is, but that’s the point: everything has a name, even if you don’t happen to know it. It also authenticates the reality of things buried in time and myth. Of course, these are first and foremost narrative poems, the details of which challenge our cautions against claims of plausibility. We in fact see and think, yes, that’s how it must have been. Of Bowie’s one-time rival James Bonham, we find
Deep gashes of vermilion and gold welter
Along the horizon; in the full onslaught
Of evening, James Butler Bonham
Drops a feral hog with one shoulder-shot
From his father’s fifty-caliber Hawken—
Lacking time to unseam and field dress
The matted tusker, he carves out a haunch
With his Green River butcher knife,
And soon a cudgel of pork thigh
Crackles and spits as the fat runs
Over a fire of dry mesquite, bedded
Embers pulsing like stars in the night heavens.
What remarkable about this series of poems is not simply the fidelity to on-the-ground history. What’s accomplished is the degree of attention to detail itself and its precise rendering. And not just the focus, but the confidence of selection and placement. In spite of the homey patriotism and debriefing in defiance of history’s dry consensus concerning the siege’s causes, execution, and consequences, something new and fresh arrives in the course of Collins’ narrative. Ever faithful to the duty for precision, as we know from Bishop, opens the possibility that we will be led to vision, even transport. Collins has set a high bar for this set of poems, even as he has thrown enough barriers in the way to kneecap a lesser poet.
The final third of the collection, as if he were pulling back the curtain on a tryptich, is a series of love poems to a long-deceased inamorata. She seems to have been an inspiring partner, if briefly (“our brief season”), who provided “the four months of grace you lavished/ On me…,” before her unexplained marriage to another man and her early death at 41. Be that as it may, the poet, while peppering the section with detail, does not divulge the exact secret of the relationship. Not that he needs to. As Pound put it in The Pisan Cantos, “What thou lovest well remains,” with the emphasis on well. What that is becomes not just a part of your personal résumé: it’s part of you.
Keeping one’s cards close to the chest has advantages in poetry, just as it does in poker. For one thing, it keeps the question mark in the back of the mind in place, but so, we learn, does it do the same thing for the poet. Young love, glorious as it is, makes a tough assignment for the mature poet. It’s likely to get mired in thematic clichés and face the hypocritical patronizing of grownups. On the other hand, no one can deny its wonderment as we’ve graduated from Eden, only to find renewal in a crush. Then there’s the sadness that moves in like a forever weather front:
It remains,
That brief season that transpired in another age,
And years pass, deepening with time the fallen
Leaves of red and gold along lost ways that yet beguile.
I note that “beguile” is a grownup sophisticate’s word and a coy one at that. The tone, as you can hear, is fruited with vintaged feelings, both acute and dark at the same time. We later learn the manner of death was an aneurysm. As for the husband, we know that “Another man’s ring encircles her desiccated finger” and that his own jade ring was “now worn like a trinket/ About her neck.” What if the ring was a trinket and the involvement its equivalent? The question is pertinent when you consider he shades his romantic treatment in hues of standard exceptionalism.
And yet, as Jarrell was wont to advise us, what comes after “and yet” makes all the difference between saying what happened and offering what it meant in the subsequent, inspirational haunting. At the heart of lyrical poetry lies the transformation of the private into the public domain, which is to say what we read is also what is lost in translation. It’s up to readers to find analogies because the poem’s expression arrives with all its attendant paradoxes, as if to say (as Dante reminded us), I can’t sing it, but I can sing on its behalf. The same might be said (or not said) of the deceased beloved herself. I’ll stop at this rabbit hole, so temping to the noses of the mighty poets, to let Collins have the last word:
All poets partake
Of the harsh joy that attends solitude, but I
Conjure only you, reaching as I do for a ripe
Nectarine in my pocket, letting the juice trickle
Down my chin, the fruit not quite out of season
In this Delta suburb. In September, crickets
Still light up at moonrise, the toad’s throat pulses
At the base of cracked masonry. But tonight,
Teresa, the wind whispers conspiracy in treetops,
And the gabbling flocks vanish along their flyway
Toward the Gulf. Plump droplets darken shingles
And I cross this threshold where all reverie ends.
David Rigsbee’s most recent publications are Watchman in the Knife Factory: New & Selected Poems (Black Lawrence Press, 2024) a translation of Dante’s Paradiso (Salmon Poetry, 2023) and MAGA Sonnets of Donald Trump (Main Street Rag, 2021). He has been a contributing editor to The Cortland Review since 2007.