The Drum that Beats Within Us (Poetry)

My Thoughts:

I saw this cover on Net Galley and I immediately grabbed it because I am always looking for poetry (not novels in verse). The power of poetry and books of poetry is that it immediately immerses the reader in a time, a place, and a message to chew on based on the poet's lens. Just looking at this cover, tied to the title, I thought Indigenous, land based, lessons learned through historical trauma and survivance.

This is not it which is both good and bad. Bond is not an Indigenous poet. That is a good thing. He does not have the right to speak for the land in that way and he wisely does not try to do so. I read the reviews. Yes, there is land in these poems, but the land is generic. these "Forests Dark of Elm" could be anywhere and nowhere. In the last poem that gives this collection its name, I realize that this drum could be any drum, "primitive as stone". . ."hunts the sorrowed unicorn beneath the laurel's shade."

This type of jarring mix of ancient and mythical takes me as a reader both in a place, and quickly within a few lines out of a specific place. Are we in Europe now? We are definitely not in America. Then in three stanzas, suddenly we see the metaphor of the drum again "steady as the Bear," capitalized when buck is not. Are we talking about Ursa major now in his "northern lair?" 

This jarring back and forth between naming a specific place ("Smith River") in Montana, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Fran, and a specific people Micmac (Mi'kmaq) of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Islands to creating generic places, anywhere places kills the power in poetry of speaking for your community, for your people, for your trauma. It waters down the message, and makes me angry when in the poem "Children Scalped" he lists tribes (including using the colonized spelling for Micmac) and uses the very Indigenous term "we" . . ."we ran frantically/we remember/name us all." The very positive outcome to this is that he has no real message to tell. His poems are just technique. That is much better than recolonizing through false empathy. 

Poetry is such a difficult road to maneuver. If this is what is published and lauded as "good," then I also say blow it up from within (and I am not speaking as a "literary mafia").  Bond says something interesting in his introduction. He says:

. . .let's make poetry ugly in the name of something new, as Le Corbusier did to architecture. And we can appoint ourselves the prophets of this revolution. Because even crap has value if it's marketed as new.

This is crap indeed. I think about these students I have mentored over the years in my classroom who have something to say, who have poetry in their blood, who continue to be edited and watered down and pushed aside in this system that we call school. Who will hear them if this is what we are listening to?