World Tree by David Wojahn (A Review by Brian Fanelli)

University of Pittsburg Press

134 pages. $16

David Wojahn’s latest collection of poems, World Tree, is a book in which the dead come alive on the page. His poems are filled with voices of the past, including spirits from the caves of Altamira and modern departed musical icons that include everyone from Johnny Cash to Joe Strummer. World Tree is an ambitious look at the scope of human history, and a book in which Wojahn continues to address the personal and the political.

As early as the first poem, “Scribal: My Mother in the Voting Booth,” Wojahn draws a connection between the ancient past and contemporary American politics by comparing his mother’s vote for Nixon to “some scribe in Lagash piercing wet clay slabs for the palace records.” Wojahn takes this comparison a step further and also compares Nixon to a fascist priest king of old, but what makes the poem more than a commentary on contemporary American politics is Wojahn’s ability to inject personal narrative into the poem. As a result of waiting in the “wet November snow of Minnesota” to vote for Nixon, the mother in the poem suffers from pneumonia. All the son can do is watch and hopes she survives, which she does. The personal narrative adds another layer and makes the poem more than a diatribe against Nixon-era politics.

Wojahn’s collection is filled with other poems that address contemporary political and social issues. In “For the Honorable Wayne LaPierre, President, National Rifle Association,” Wojahn takes on the issue of gun violence, specifically how Howard Reed Scott III, a 17-year-old, shot Tyler Binsted, a 19-year-old, in 2008 at a tennis court in Virginia, due to a robbery gone afoul. Wojahn points out that as a young man killed another young man, the NRA president had the luxury of sleeping in a gated community and probably paid little attention to the story, or others like it. Wojahn again draws connections between the past and present by evoking Italian poet Dante and imagining that he would have placed LaPierre all the way down in the seventh circle of The Inferno— a river of boiling blood where “the damned cannot rise above the singing waters” and cannot speak.

By writing the poem, Wojahn also made Howard Reed Scott and Tyler Binsted’s names live on, repeating them a few times in the poem, a technique Wojahn’s uses throughout World Tree as a way to allow the dead to speak, to rise up and warn us about some of our contemporary flaws.

Another more recent issue Wojahn addresses is Hurricane Katrina, both its mishandling by top government officials and its aftermath. In the poem “In the Domed Stadium,” Wojahn gives voice to the thousands of residents that were packed in the Louisiana Superdome after the tragedy. The poem is one of the most memorable in the collection because of its stark images that serve as reminder of the tragedy. Wojahn writes:

Children sleep two & three

to a cot & the old have folded up their walkers, wallets & dentures

gripped in their fingers

to protect them from theft. There are crutches, wheelchairs,

rusted yellow tanks of oxygen

& always the black plastic trashbags, overflowing with clothes,

& toiletries, Gameboys,

Pop Tarts, photo albums of the dead in polyester.

Like other collections by Wojahn, World Tree also features music-based poems. What makes the new collection unique, however, is Wojahn’s decision to give voice to some lesser known musicians. One musician the poet decided to address is Jimmie Rodgers, a country singer who Wojahn describes as “the hillbilly Keats of my father’s 78s.” He maintains the comparison to Keats throughout the poem, drawing parallels between the singer and poet’s lives because both died from tuberculosis. Wojahn also plays with the words written on Keats’ tombstone by stating Rodgers’ name is “writ on railroad ties.”

Wojahn does address more contemporary, popular musicians. In the sequence of poems entitled “World Tree,” Wojahn evokes Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, Joe Strummer, and Johnny Cash, just to name a few. Wojahn uses music in a number of ways in the sequence. In the part of the poem that focuses on Dylan, Wojahn mixes rock ‘n roll history with U.S. history. He juxtaposes the image of Dylan going electric and getting booed and jeered at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 with images of Civil Rights activists getting hosed and clubbed.

By doing this, he manages to capture the turbulence of the 1960s. He also highlights the moment in music history when Dylan was labeled a sell-out and fans felt he betrayed the protest movement because he plugged in.

Wojahn also uses the poetic sequence as yet another way to draw connections between the past and present. In the poem’s final sequence, Wojahn paints an image of his sons dancing to The Ramones, and he compares his children to ancient people dancing and drumming, trying to summon the dead. The comparison works because the children in the poem are indeed evoking the dead by playing the music of a band in which three of its four members—Joey, Johnny, and Dee Dee— are deceased. But they live on and speak whenever their music is played.

One of the last highlights of the collection is the long poetic sequence “Ochre,” which features a haunting series of drawings and photos of Neolithic art, mixed with random turn of the last century photographs. Wojahn shows off his poetic powers in this sequence and adopts the personas of some of the people in the photos and paintings, including former Vice President Dick Cheney wearing a gas mask.

World Tree proves that Wojahn is successfully able to connect the past to the present in his poems, while employing a wide range of poetic forms, including lyrics, free verse, and long poetic sequences. Like his other collections, especially Mystery Train, World Tree also has plenty of references to rock ‘n roll and pop culture. Through a wide range of poems that tackle a slew of issues, Wojahn reminds us how much the past influences the present, and how the deceased live on through art, photos, song, and stories. Just flip through the pages of World Tree and take a listen.

*

~Brian Fanelli is the author of the chapbook Front Man, published in late 2010 by Big Table Publishing. His poems have also been published by The Portland Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Word Riot, Blood Lotus,Chiron Review, and they are forthcoming in Yes, Poetry, San Pedro River Review, andEvening Street Review. He has an M.F.A. in creative writing from Wikes University, and currently resides in Pennsylvania. Visit him at www.brianfanelli.com.~