Kevin Prufer, The Fears

 

I keep returning to the image of a kitten
asleep in the engine

As a way of understanding
the history of my country.

So warm under the car’s hood,
the hidden sweetness in the dark machinery.

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Start the car.

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[The sound the kitten makes.]

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Happy slaves on a lazy afternoon
sleeping in the shadow of hay bales.

A banjo lying in the sun.
Stolen apples.

A lithograph on the wall in my father’s office:
The sweet ol’ summah time. (“Automotive”)

I’m currently working my way through American poet Kevin Prufer’s ninth poetry collection (and the first I’ve seen of his), The Fears (Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2023), following titles such as National Anthem (2008), In a Beautiful Country (2011), Churches (2014), How He Loved Them (2018) and The Art of Fiction (2021). There’s a meandering sharpness to these pieces, a movement that is incredibly precise, reminiscent of the late Toronto poet David Donnell for a kind of conversational tone that moves and sways and coheres in ways that are almost startling (although the language feels more exact than Donnell). I see this comparison most obvious in the rhythms of poems such as “W.H. Auden’s ‘The Fall of Rome’,” that opens with a pacing and a conversational kind of ease entirely comparable with Donnell’s catalogue:

In the final lines of his great poem “The Fall of Rome,”
Auden describes
                           not the facts
of the late Empire’s fall,
                                       but distant herds of reindeer
moving quickly and silently
across vast expanses of golden moss.
                                                            We don’t know
where those herds are,
                                     only that they seem impossibly
far from the troubles of men,
                                              not mindless but
beyond mind,
                       uncountable, twilit, inhuman,
unconcerned with the failures of empires.

Prufer’s poems begin with a moment, and then work to articulate every angle of it, unable to move beyond until every particle is properly considered. “He had become fascinated by the way / excellent poems sometimes failed to hold together,” Prufer’s title poem begins, “in ways he expected them to. / That is, / a poem, like a great mind at work / on an unsolvable problem, / might by necessity / meander […].” He manages his meandering in such deliberate motions, without a word or thought out of place, even through a sequence of explorations through and around language, perception and memory. “but Greek loneliness,” he writes, as part of the poem “The Greek Gods,” “seems closer to explaining / the forces that brought us here / and make me wander / the hospital skybridges / late at night, / watching that same McDonald’s blinking / into darkness.” Prufer manages meditative stretches that rhythmically extend and hold across great distances, and such intimacy through asking some rather big questions of existence and being, propelled through the pacing of what he describes as his fears; and his fears, one might say, are legion.