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99 pp./$15
Paul Lieber- a student of Method acting- has spent most of his adult life playing tough-guy roles on Broadway and in Hollywood. He played Eric Dorsey in the TV series Barney Miller and has also appeared in many other shows, including Dallas, The X-Files and Law and Order. Now he has come out with a collection of poems that reveal his tender side, which is on display whether he is remembering his growing-up years on the streets of New York City, his long career as an actor, his more recent years as the father of a young son or, tragically, as the brother of a woman dying prematurely of cancer. All through this book, the tone is conversational, the style seemingly effortless, the humor smart and sly. Here, as in many poetry collections, the most memorable poems come near the beginning, so let us build up to them by making our way backwards in this volume, and considering first the sections devoted to a dying woman and a growing child, before concluding with Lieber’s most individual contributions.
In “Sister,” he describes, in frank detail, moments in the early years of his relationship with his sister:
I’d surrender on the toilet where
the light was strongest. She above me,
searching. She pinched, tweaked.
The blackhead lifted. Precision pressed
on to neck side, ear lobe, a lung or two.
She’d wipe dead cells on my hand.
A cotton ball dipped in alcohol slammed
pores shut.
This passage is especially poignant since it is the only poem in the collection in which the sister is portrayed as the caregiver; usually it is the brother (the narrator) who must care for her, much later in life, when she is stricken with cancer. These pieces about the sister make up the book’s last section, and they are memorable for their unpretentiousness and eloquence. In “We Think” Lieber writes:
Each day
the phone rings with all the love
she couldn’t feel.
The eulogy starts before
they lower the body.
Praise heaped
in the hope to keep
her above the boxwoods
in the nurturing cries
as years run into minutes,
as mobility stills.
Humor and tenderness are also present, in abundance, in the book’s middle section, devoted exclusively to the growing-up years of Lieber’s young son, Sam. Whereas we watch all the horrendous details of the sister’s death in the book’s final section, here we see lovely vignettes and the joyous thoughts of a new father.”Going In” begins:
His neck is longer
this morning and
the profile is almost
a regular thin boy.
He’s eleven days
old and he grows
in my arms.
As good as the Sam poems are, they have a weakness that they share with the sister poems: the subject matter is not explored in a startlingly imaginative way. The first years of a son’s life and the last days of a sister’s are depicted with honesty and insight, but they don’t break any new ground either in form or content. There are hundreds of good poems just like them being written every day. And in the case of the Sam poems, there are simply too many of them: sometimes father and son are at the train store, sometimes at the aquarium, sometimes at the playground- and this goes on through twenty-four poems. It’s as if Lieber, as a doting father, has packed too many photographs into the family album, instead of just choosing the best ones.
It is in the collection’s opening section, dealing with Lieber’s own early years and career in acting, that his art shines most individually. While nearly all people become parents and witness the deaths of relatives, it’s safe to say that not too many actors also have parallel lives as poets: this subject matter is intrinsically interesting; and, what’s more, Lieber approaches his material with an artistry that is always surprising and fresh. One poem, for example, has the whimsical title “After Two Hundred-Fifty TV Shows, a Couple of Years on Broadway and Thirty Cents in My Bank Account.” And the noirish poem itself, set in an agent’s office in a mini-mall, doesn’t disappoint. But the masterpiece of Lieber’s actor poems is “The Audition of Clouds.” It is about an older actor waiting his turn to audition and musing about the passing of the years, brilliantly compared to the imperceptible movements of a cloud; the cloud overhead passes so gradually that we don’t believe it is moving at all, but it is: time passes for all of us. The cloud imagery is linked to the powder and makeup on the actor’s face:
Under the powder,
those stationary clouds,
the illusory ones
convince you you’re the same,
still dazzled
by Clifford Brown, Billie Holiday
and the jump shot.
The poem broadens out to view other actors before the narrator returns, with naked honesty, at the end:
No words, just fake glee
and fake affection
for my fake wife
who sits next to the fake me.
Lieber is at his best in his showbiz and New York poems. While he may appear on the surface to have been influenced more by Humphrey Bogart than Robert Lowell, the craft and subtlety evident in this work reveal his thorough assimilation of modern literary masters. This poetry is at once accessible and profound, and deserves to be read and reread.
Alex M. Frankel’s reviews appear regularly in The Antioch Review and have also appeared in Rattle, Poetic Diversity and Poetry Flash. His website is www.alexmfrankel.com; Paul Lieber’s website is www.paullieber.com.