Arbutus Reviews

Kevin Prufer’s National Anthem is an American revelry for the twenty-first century—dark, comic, apocalyptic. His poems are inviting and inclusive despite their stark subject matter and imagery. Using long lines that are often punctuated by single line stanzas or by a tabbed line bread Prufer’s poems move across the whole page and draw attention to his syntax, humor, and pathos as they utilize the white space available. Take “Landscape with Hospital and Empire” for example. Here is the first stanza:

Then there is quiet.
                     The hospital sleeps on the cliff. 
Ice swath and storm—the sky gone bird-like, the leaves gone gray. 
The fruit trees are griefless and still, creaking
                                                  like old knees in a stiff wind
and far below, where the cold sea licks the sand, 
						                           an ambulance idles.
How tiny, the driver seen from the hospital window. And chill.

The first line sets up the wit of Prufer’s line breaks. The white space after “quiet” punctuates and enacts the content of the line. As does ending the next line on “cliff.” The stark imagery is precise and this landscape is both stark and restless. Things are at rest (“the hospital sleeps,” “the fruit trees are…still”) but the sky moves away “bird-like” and the “ambulance idles.” Things are still but movement and implied violence are everywhere. This is, of course, a pause in the action, indicated in the first line. The second stanza locates this landscape in a particular zone:

This is the empire’s edge. The blue sea salts the shore.
							  The Caesars, 
cold in their beds, have paper skin and rings. They watch TV
or push the nurse-call buttons, eyes rolled white in their skulls. 

And where can the slaves have gone? Over the blue and harrowing sea?
Where are the girls who play tambourines, who tap them
on their thighs and sing?
			               And where, the boy who juggles silver plates?
The three-armed man, the giant, the Nubian and his drums?

Prufer has placed his reader at the edge of empire in a hospital where the rulers are aging and sick. They are idle and powerless. Then the poem peppers with questions about the powerless. When at the edge of an empire, an epoch of colonization where history is uncompromising and has claimed the oppressors in their old age what happens to the enslaved? The entertainers? The wise and exotic fools of court? Prufer does not tell us, but returns to image as this is a “Landscape” not a history, treaty, or explanation of empire. This is description of the state of things. The state of things is sticky and broken:

The gluey air is hot with breaths and glare. 
					                   he Caesars dream
of Rome. Gone, the snow. Gone, the stutter and the aged gait.
Away—in dreams—the hands that shook to take the scepter, 
that dropped the plates
			            and broke them on the floor. 
They yearn to recreate 
			            the empire in gold and slaves. 
The sun that filled the streets with glow, the Forum’s shout.
A girl is selling favors from a booth, a tribune drinking wine
from a new clay bowl.

Nothing lasts. Not even rulers. This is Prufer’s America. On the edge. Teetering. Changing. He moves through these landscapes from the beginning, set up by the opening poem, “Apocalypse.”
I will admit I was skeptical of an apocalypse, Cormac McCarthy, type poem where a couple wanders into the city in search of food, newspapers blow past, and teeth are sharp. But Prufer doesn’t let the poem lapse into narrative goofiness or let the subject matter get away from him. Instead, the poem takes on overtones of an apocalypse film and makes use of some of its devices (ironically and literally) and becomes a comment on contemporary relationship and violence. The poem is almost tender as the wandering couple finds the skull of a little girl.

The ambulance idles in the snow. 
				                 Ice has thrilled the windshield 
with circuitry and cold. The driver smiles to see the hospital 
teeter on the cliff
		             and nearly fall. 

The Caesars, he knows, are frail and old. The gods
have filled their skulls with snow
				     and time will throw the empire in the sea.

These moments framed with creative use of personification of things like “The American West” and shopping centers make this book a pleasure to read. Prufer comes at the concept of America from many angles and is able to characterize its many problems without ranting or cliché. His compelling images and terse narrative moments should be read and then read again.

Jeremy Voigt