If
you think of poetry as relegated to either Valentine’s Day greeting cards or to
literature class textbooks understandable only to literature professors, then
you haven’t read a Bridgeman poem. The Odd Testament is Randolph Bridgeman’s
third collection of poetry, and here he continues to deliver poems that are neither
sappy nor inaccessible. Bridgeman’s poems are for and about the everyman—around
us and in us, whether we acknowledge that everyman or not.
He
writes of the people from whom we turn away, superior in the knowledge that we
are not like them: the child with OCD, the homeless man living in McDonald’s,
the depressed man shooting his ex-lover’s Beanie Babies. And he writes of the
people we sometimes become and probably don’t admit to being: the spectator
watching one dog hump another, the teen driven to amoral behavior by lust,
the person who loses everything “because
this was just one more/thing in a long list of stupid shit/that he’d done.”
Bridgeman’s
portrayal of the characters in his poems is frank, and as stripped of
pretension as his language. His poems aren’t lengthy; he uses simple, often
profane, language; and he limits capitalization and punctuation. Actually, Bridgeman
sums up a lot of his own poetry in his poem “poetry readings,” where the
narrator states:
i
want to hear poetry that comes
shooting
out of you like the beer shits
i
could give a rat’s ass about the
good
ole boys in letterman sweaters
i
want to hear about that boy you dragged
home
from a single-parent home
in
government subsidized housing
on
the other side of town
Even
the poems that are based on the Bible have that unique Bridgeman everyman bent.
For example, in the poem “the odd testament,” he takes the stories of Adam,
Abraham, Jonah, and Lazarus and gives us a decidedly mortal spin, comparing God
to a single parent:
god
was the first single parent but
certainly
not the last to be out there
bustin’
ass to keep the lights and water on
and
giving us the innermost thoughts of a surprised and pissed Lazarus who finds
himself resurrected “after he’d confessed to/family he’d wronged/been forgiven
his debts.” The treatment of the stories of Abraham and Jonah broaches the
topic of the divide between father and son that surfaces in later poems such as
“a brief conversation with my father about classic greek literature” that ends
with “i can’t have an intelligent/conversation with you about/anything he says
slamming/the door on his way out.”
Even
though Bridgeman’s approach is one of simplicity, most of his poems demonstrate
the poet’s command of language. For example, in “lessons,” Bridgeman compares a
son who bucks his father’s mold to “that stripped screw he couldn’t back
out/that bent nail that cracked his wood/that rounded nut he couldn’t tighten,”
and describes the heat of a summer night as “summer’s air slides down/like a
tight skirt” in “in the woods.” Not every poem is equally strong. A few are
more clever than insightful, proselytize, merely eavesdrop, or simply report on
some of the more grotesque attributes of people.
Some
poems in the collection are tender, some are funny, some are un-PC, most invite
us in and let us know that we are all Adams and Eves in our own way, but damn
it, someone loves us anyway. A good many are written in first person. Whether
they are confessional only the poet knows, but it doesn’t really matter, for
one man’s confession may very well be our own. Which, I think, is the point.
