rev. of Meaning a Cloud by J. W. Marshall

Meaning a Cloud, poems by J. W. Marshall (Oberlin):  J. W. Marshall's starkly beautiful first book, Meaning a Cloud, is a bang-up narrative of fracture and its aftermath—a sort of out-of-body reportage born of dumb luck injury and the careful exploration of what repair (or endurance) entails. The landscape is one of dissonance: scattering clouds, jigsaw puzzles with missing pieces, the numbing blue of hospital tvs, and Guernica plastered in the room for sadness therapy.

The opening poem, "Harborview Medical Hospital," juxtaposes a casual tone with a life-changing (threatening) event: "There was this hospital / that came into my life / at the end of an ambulance..." and in this seemingly detached manner, we are introduced to the other life that begins at the moment of impact. In the book's first and most powerful of three sections, Marshall plainly describes that collision, both physical and psychic, as in the wonderfully titled "Pocket History of What Happened": "I was / hit by a car." The line break here suggests the pre-accident I who "was," and the newly defined I: "hit by a car."

But that plain speaking is much mixed with the run-on sentences, fragments, and repetition of a mind (and body) attempting to make sense of new parameters, relearning how to walk and converse with the world at hand, which by virtue of the speaker's calamity, is changed too. It's the sort of reinvention of world and self seen in the poetry of Tadeusz Rosewicz. With the Polish poet, the Genesis occurs after the handmade horrors of World War II. In Marshall's case, the injury is no question of morality, just the sucker punch of being in the wrong place when a car ("an element / to transport us / through elements") loses control.

What ensues is a jigsaw puzzle of "a world in pieces." That disjointed quality is echoed in the syntax: "A statue in the city of an Indian / welcoming white men to the shore / is how the waiting felt." In this new reality, an elevator ride to buy a candy bar at the hospital canteen becomes a harrowing journey, "a travelogue" where: "Inside my skull / the brain is full inside the elevator inside.../ The trip for candy is some of everything."

The collection finds its title in "Shampoo & Sponge Bath," the trauma unit's equivalent of a shave and a hair cut in which the speaker (yes, we want to call him Marshall given that the speaker addresses himself thusly in a fine ghazal) is wheeled outside for the first time after the accident under a "terrifyingly large sky." "There's one the orderly said / meaning a cloud / that looks like you. There was weakness in each of them. There was fraying wind. A mess / he said like you / before your bath." There's a tenderness in the orderly's bluntness, and an acceptance on the speaker's behalf that like a cloud a man in an instant can break apart, can scatter.

In "July 14, 2006," the speaker juxtaposes "special God awful news" with the mundane annoyance of "Andy Williams's Moon River / looping through my head." But the crux of the poem is the question: "What was Beirut before / the slag and plumes and agony?" The not quite answer comes later: "Seattle is a rubble kit too." Of course, in our beginning is our end, Marshall reminds us: we're all rubble kits.

And it's that slower ruination that the third section addresses. In "Taken With," the speaker tends a vanishing mother: "All day long she said I'm D.I.C. / my niece the veterinarian having once told her / the code for Dead in Cage." The long poem is a kind of book end, chronicling an unraveling for which there is no therapy, no antidote, just the accrual of loss, as evidenced in this tender, wrenching exchange between mother and son: "John she said her eyes still shut / do those roses all have names? I said / I'm sure they do. And pets have names? / Of course they do. And you and I / have names. I wonder why."  —Andrea Cohen

Andrea Cohen is the author of The Cartographer's Vacation and Long Division (forthcoming from Salmon Poetry). She directs the Blacksmith House Reading Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts.