Arnold T. Schwab: Arnold T. Schwab, a Harvard Ph.D., has taught English at UCLA, the University of Michigan, and, for twenty years, at California State University, Long Beach. A scholar, biographer, and poet, he has published four scholarly books including a prize-winning biography of the important late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critic James G. Huneker and many articles and reviews on American literature, music, and drama. His book of poems Elegy for a Gay Giraffe appeared in 1988, and his poems have been printed in California Voice, Gay Books Bulletin, and other magazines and newspapers. Now retired, he lives in Westminster, California.
The Alchemy of Opposites is Clifton Snider's eighth book of poetry, his first one having appeared in l976. It contains, in my judgment, his best work in verse, his most personal and moving.
The book is divided into seven sections. Of these I find the first four the most interesting. With one exception, I believe, the poems are written in short-line free verse; the exception is the title poem, a slightly irregular Shakespearean sonnet, which celebrates his present, satisfying relationship with his Guatemalan lover, to whom the book is dedicated. This poem comes late in the book after he has described, in other poems, several failed relationships in which alcohol and drugs, he hints, played a part. One entire section, entitled “Autumn Tulips: Poems for Trent,” memorializes an artist lover who committed suicide in his late thirties, apparently a victim of drugs, leaving the abandoned but still-loving poet bereft.
Loss, indeed, is one of Snider's pervasive themes, not only of friends and lovers (some victims of AIDS) but also of family members, most notably of a gay brother who mysteriously disappeared, presumably murdered, at the age of thirty-four; one of Alchemy's most touching poems, “A Last Good-Bye,” is devoted to him. Less poignant but nevertheless affecting is “Holocaust,” which is devoted to the poet's possibly gay Norwegian cousin, who never returned from a concentration camp.
Travel also plays an important part in this collection, as Snider makes poetry out of his visits to Norway — homeland of his mother's family — where he searches for roots and fruits (sorry; I could not resist the pun) as, of course, many gay visitors to Europe do. Other poems are set in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Canada, where he delves into the background of his father's family. In later sections of the book one finds a number of poems dealing with the culture, myths, and inhabitants of New Mexico, where he spent several summers on resident fellowships in an artists' colony in Taos; he also lived in Albuquerque, receiving a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of New Mexico there.
Another obvious interest of Snider's is nature, especially exotic animals such as vampire bats, pearl fish, sea urchins, jewel wasps, pipefish, and toucans, all of which serve as the subject of deft, descriptive poems which reveal his powers of observation or curious reading. Their applicability to human experience — of greater concern to a humanist than a naturalist — is not generally apparent (if intended) though Snider has a special eye for the switching of gender stereotypes when he writes, for example, about male fish who give birth. He has tongue in cheek, I believe, when he describes the Caribbean pearlfish which hides in the anus of another fish, not for pleasure but for protection. Such poems would delight the admirers of Marianne Moore.
The slyly entitled “Family Values,” dealing with a lion who kills his own cub which is then eaten by his mother and his siblings, is probably a dig at the religious right's homophobic touting of the conventional family unit. Other poems may also have a hidden human relevance that eluded me.
I myself would welcome greater attention to sound and rhythm to accompany Snider's emotional directness and the admirable accessibility of his imagery. Some of his lines show signs that he is not insensitive to these aspects of poetic technique: “a sleek body with matching spirit”; “I'm up to your tricks, / I have my pick — three, six, / nine heads… Master, measure, or me”; Leni Riefenstahl “attracted Hitler, who hissed. / She found him irresistible”; “before puberty rendered me impotent” (also a striking paradox); “beer dampened my fears”; and the final stanza of the poem “For Jean-Claude, Adieu”: “You ended your e-mail with 'kiss' / and this is mine to you / mon cher ami / adieu.” Mining of this vein, I think, would produce more nuggets.
In one of his most memorable poems, “The Intruder,” the narrator is torn between his fear of a near-naked drunken intruder in his home — one with dark blond hair and tan muscles, he notes — and his unspoken attraction to the man suggested by the seemingly simple statement of the final line — “I let him go” — which actually embodies a subtle amalgam of magnanimity, renunciation, and regret. Other poems I especially liked were “Survivor,” “All the Young Men,” “Hanging On,” and “Scenes from a Memory Album: First Boyfriend,” all of which have an obvious poignancy for gay men.
The Alchemy of Opposites, indeed, contains outcroppings of pure gold.
commenting closed for this article