Matthea Harvey’s Sad Little Breathing Machine

I’m going to try a different approach to reviewing Matthea Harvey’s Sad Little Breathing Machine. Here is a poem that I think simultaneously showcases Harvey’s talents but ultimately falls short of being what I call a successful poem: 

Can We See

What I thought was
the wind was a bicycle & lo

my head was halved again. 
Red buds measled the ground. 

Jealous Narcissus bit the river.
The sky was a memoir of blue.

In between the blades of grass hosanna
there was much greener grass. 

In Sad Little Breathing Machine what I like about Matthea Harvey most is her ability to tweak my own perception of the physical world with her linguistic rendition of it. In “Can We See,” a phrase like “Red buds measled the ground” was especially effective because of her manipulation of “Measles” to “measled.” She turns a proper noun into a verb that fits snugly into its place in the line by pushing the boundaries of language and perception. Likewise, calling the sky a “memoir of blue” is beautiful-sounding, and much of what appealed to me in Sad Little Breathing Machine was some permutation of this kind of language play coupled with a tight rhythm. 

But “Can We See” is a short poem, and the danger of short poems is having to say so much in so few words, and Harvey’s work reflects this by her need to allude to something greater in her imagery: her mention of “Narcissus” in the fifth line carries double weight by alluding to the story of a boy renowned for his beauty that falls in love with his own reflection. It is also a white or yellow flower. My problem with Harvey’s allusions in “Can We See” is that because it is so short,  it was hard to understand the relevance of the mention with the words contained in the poem. I’m sure Harvey is not arbitrarily name dropping, but it lessens the validity of her reference if the relevance fails to reach her audience. I do like “Can We See,” but I probably would have passed over the poem more taken in by its beauty-in-the-moment instead of getting stuck on referential significance (i.e.: without it, I would have f’ing loved this poem).

Harvey stitches out a lot of good lines (“Someone in a red shirt began to run/behind the trees each night in a poor imitation/of sunset,” ) and has rendered some really provocative poem titles (“O the Zoetrope & the Periscope Should Be Friends,” “Reverberations in the Snail/World,” “Abandoned Conversation with the Senses”) in Sad Little Breathing Machine. But my complaint about “Can We See” is an example of my complaint about the book: everything is really pretty, but so little resolves in a way that satisfies me. It took me a long time to warm up to the book, and because I couldn’t quite dig the substance out, I found myself bored throughout a lot of the beginning. But I still think as a poet one is able to learn a lot from Harvey about the craft of lines, the rhythm thereof, and rendering perception. Take a poem I really liked, called “Town of Then”:

I meant me in the general sense
when I said did you want me.

The Old World smoked in the fireplace.
Rain fell in a post-Romantic way.

In a spoon the ceiling fan whirred.
Heads in the planets, toes tucked

under carpets, that’s how we got our bodies
through. The drink we drank was cordial.

The amnesiac made a delicious sauce
& traced its radius to remember;

the translator made the sign for horses
backing away from a lump of sugar.

The sun was almost eye-level.
The trains twitched in their tracks.

Everything I like about “Town of Then” is in Harvey’s observance of small gestures: the ceiling fan reflected in the spoon, the “toes tucked/ under carpets,” the amnesiac’s trace to jog his memory, the trains twitching in their tracks, and of course the translator, who most obviously makes signs in order to relay a message. Like a fiction writer, Harvey’s details construct a mood and atmosphere without relying on too much exposition (or narration). The reader is able to infer the ambiance of the moment, and there is not much riding on outside context to defer the reader from the poem. That’s not to say that I’m a proponent of formalist poetry, but I am saying that Harvey is real good at constructing moods and worlds without the aid of previously constructed stories. Harvey is at her strongest when red buds measle the ground, and despite the emptiness I felt when I first started Sad Little Breathing Machine, I would still say it’s worth picking up, especially if you have time to read it twice.