DM Bradford, Bottom Rail on Top

 

                                                Not a poem

but plantation dining room
    ceiling pulley fan
boy fatherlands and rope

I’m just now seeing a copy of Montreal-based poet and translator DM Bradford’s second full-length collection, Bottom Rail on Top (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2024), a follow-up to Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Composed across an accumulated thirteen poem-sections, from “rope to” and “ashes to” to “new corps” and “lil chug,” the short poems of Bottom Rail on Top exist as sketch-notes, lyric bursts that suggest the gesture but are intricate and precise in their execution. As the back cover offers: “Somewhere in the cut between Harriet Jacobs and surveillance, Southampton and sneaker game, Lake Providence and the supply chain, Bottom Rail on Top sees D.M. Bradford stage one personal present alongside American histories of antebellum Black life and emancipation—a call and response between the complications of legacy and selfhood.” There is a kind of call-and-response to how these poems assemble, a through-line of notes and their commentary, akin to a kind of Greek chorus or counter-narrative. Each section, a cluster of short sketch-poems, with the occasional prose-commentary, providing a blend of further narrative, additional information and a kind of summing-up, set at the end of a handful of sections. The third section, “stock,” for example, ends with a prose block that begins: “Not a poem but a succession of little cuts. You hear about Sally Hemings over and over again. You don’t hear that much about Martha Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s first wife, being Sally’s half-sister. You don’t hear much about Betty Hemings, Martha’s father’s enslaved mistress, Sally’s mother. You don’t hear much about the other half-siblings, how many of them Martha, along with Thomas, inherited, the Hemings family among 135. Commonplace horrors.” Not a poem, Bradford repeats as a mantra across the title of each poem and the opening of each commentary, suggesting a push against the impossibility of the lyric while simultaneously offering its artifice, even as the poems work through and across it, connecting Bottom Rail on Top to works such as M NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2008) [see my archived review from The Antigonish Review here], for example. “Not a poem,” Bradford writes, near the end of the fifth section, “but to write at last / past the old place / one last time // by boat / the breeze and the sunshine / north by fatherlands / ten days and ten nights [.]”

As Bradford’s debut worked through an absent father, Bottom Rail on Top also runs as a book-length project wrapping around layers and application of lyric study around history, ancestry and echoes of slavery and the American south. To close the first section, Bradford’s untitled prose-block begins: “Not a poem, but a big house is a big house. Imagine I’m standing in one being told every brick that makes it up was made on site by children. That said children didn’t not look like me, and kept the fire going around the clock. Imagine the tour guide announcing all this, dressed to look like the mistress of the house. Someone helps dress her in the morning, pile the whole thing on, button it up the back.” The shadow of history is long indeed, even moreso if one doesn’t attempt to understand it, as Bradford writes to open the acknowledgments:

This work would not exist without the tether of ancestors enslaved in the so-called United States and Jamaica. In these outgrowths of the simple history I was raised with, that was meant to raise a Black man and an American, I look for them and find I can’t possibly know them. Looking at my life, I’m certain those ancestors, along with the many enslaved Africans this book is indebted to, would sooner recognize its mastery than its subjection. This work was in no small part shaped by that thought. And everything that connects me to them despite it.

 

David Bradford, Dream of No One but Myself

 

The snow plow into the police car
into the bus      into the truck
      that hit the other bus
that hit everything else
           gone viral 

Not different   but
now to me shrunken as if
on a long-standing whim
to remain very hidden
            to be entered
      via a hairline fracture

in everything    he returned to
      his whole life      That shrine
still swelling marianne
            slushy as of monday (“Spoon”)

I’d been looking forward to seeing Montreal poet, editor and publisher David Bradford’s full-length debut, Dream of No One but Myself (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2021), a collection that seeks conversation, even uncomfortably so, around the life and eventual loss of a father, a man who long disappeared from the daily lives of his wife and young son but for brief, difficult periods. Utilizing elements of erasure, lyric and narrative, Bradford writes of the semi-presence and distances of a father, and the erasures that ensued through that of both himself and his mother. “Too late to help. Or stop // letting what I lost. / Be what I lost.” he writes, as part of the extended lyric and erasure collage-sequence, “The Plot.” Through shifts and turns, Bradford writes of his upbringing and his parents, both individually and together, acknowledging the mutability of the text and the present; of half-siblings, memory and the past. This is less a collection of poems, erasures and photographs than a scrapbook, with all the scraps, missing stories, snapshots and incomplete or even conflicting narratives, attempting to make sense of what exactly it portrays, and what exactly it means. As Bradford’s collection suggests, through altered photographs from the family archive, not even a still photograph is free from alteration, as memory shifts or context expands. This collection exists as a curious structural counterpoint to another recent Brick Books debut around parental loss and story-reclamation through the form of the poetic scrapbook, Andrea Actis’ Grey All Over (Brick Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. “My point to her,” Bradford writes, as part of “The Mess,” “those years, was: if you keep having to clean it up then / you ain’t cleaning shit; aren’t you tired yet?” The poems of Dream of No One but Myself work not to write out the past but, through erasure and recombinative structures, attempt instead to find a new kind of clarity and comprehension.

The Hair

Care enough about either of us. She will indulge herself a little. Telling it again this way: she grew till 17 and a half. A madness, she insists, she kept up at her mother’s behest. How my grandmother, a woman all of 4’8”—her size-five shoes handed down to me till I was ten—desperately, desperately wanted her hunching daughter to make it to at least five feet. How budvig and two cups of powdered milk every day would ensure it. As tall a daughter as she could get. How my grandmother, who cut my mother’s hair a twee bowl till she was 12 to thicken it past the thickness of her own childishly genteel locks—hair I never quite failed to call cheveux d’ange, like the pasta, picking at her bi-yearly perm while she cackled—would have done everything in her power to will my wee mother’s bones up. How she prayed. And my mother answered. By standing exactly five feet. Much taller than she should have been. And stopped drinking milk for a decade.

My mother’s hair, forever since, is so thick. She hunches to this day.

There is a silence in this collection, one articulated through writing all that surrounds it, revealing the shape and the scope of it; a silence and an anxiety. And yet, there are places where the silence and the darkness bleed through, writing the many complications of a father through a staggered, fractured narrative; one with only the narrator himself as connecting through-line, otherwise appearing and disappearing. Bradford writes of how we are shaped and formed and diminished and even, at times, erased, writing the difficulties the narrator and his mother endured. “How neither of us / wish to rewrite or relive / or can / quite yet,” he writes, as part of “Even Ways of Looking at Nothing,” “You / polishing haikus / about polishing // Me / unearthing Stevens / desperate / for the both of us [.]”