by Josh English
Drunk on Mystery: a review of Jeffrey Skinner’s Sober Ghost
Jeffrey Skinner is among the country’s most vital living poets; his forty-some years of publishing represent American surrealism at its most charming and spiritual, his suburban landscapes infused with a soulfulness and fever that is pure Americana. However, in his newest book, Sober Ghost, his ninth full-length collection, Skinner is his most death-haunted and inward-searching. In the titular poem, he observes how, after thirty years of sobriety, alcohol’s power manifests less as a physical or psychological temptation, and much more as a kind of spiritual annihilation. The oblivion of drunkenness is an ever-present force that, he writes, is
“behind trees bending furiously in the wind.”
It is of course not uncommon for poets (or anyone) to consider their own mortality as they age, especially as they experience a series of losses. Even as a much younger poet, a rogue’s gallery of alcoholics, ne’er-do-wells, the fundamentally doomed, and the tragically terminal expired on the pages of Skinner’s books. But as elegiac as many of these recent poems begin, they often buck the dourness of their subject matter and leap into more questioning and metaphysical territory. His poem “The Cloud” begins, “My mother’s been dead for three months. / I don’t know where she is now or how she got there.” After a brief digression concerning the mystery of the afterlife, Skinner considers Florida and how his mother had loved it there for years. Then, in a self-reflexive leap, he comments on the poem, which is written in quatrains, and the utility of form:
Quatrains are useful because, as Creeley Said:
strong feeling wants a container.
At least, I remember words to that effect.
All words mingle, eventually, in the same cloud.
This gesture toward authenticity, where the maker pushes aside artifice to comment upon his medium in the act of creation, is also an act of self-interrogation. By questioning form, Skinner also probes the grief his poem is so urgent to communicate. When he leaps back into the texture of the poem in the final quatrain, the register of language has changed, whittled down to its essential parts. And what remains, behind the self-reflexive impulse, is a language of mystification.
I also like Florida, the ocean more than the sun.
Being in waves reminds me of something
I once was, and maybe will be again.
But I have no idea, really, what I mean by that.
This reluctance to impose meaning on experience is also evident in his poems of memory. In “Love & Judgement,” a narrative lyric concerning himself at nineteen, he observes:
Of course, it was October I think maybe evening at least
That’s when most things happened suddenly inside me
Happened on a skeleton of a bird at forest’s edge
A crispy light in & around the scrubbed-clean matchstick bones
White now as god’s teeth & as necessary, weightless
This sense of change occurring spontaneously within the younger self is at once an observation of the inexperience of youth, where his nineteen year old self is unable to identify the chain reaction of interior growth (these things just “happen” all on their own), and an observation of the symbiosis between the interior life and an external world that is charged with possibility and mystical potential, where bird bones are permeated with holiness. We follow this nineteen-year-old Skinner through the woods and into forbidding black waters of a pond, where, confronting this symbol of death, the young man takes fright and runs off to the sound of “barred owls calling out / What do you know what do you know what do you know.” Even here, sifting through his own memory, the line of questioning the barred owl poses is aimed at the mature Skinner as much as it is to the young searcher.
In poem after poem, Sober Ghost reflects the work of a master craftsman using his honed skills to open himself wide to the unresolved and the unresolvable. There is an authentic, vulnerable investigation at work in these poems, more so than any of his previous books. This is Skinner’s first book without a concentrated section devoted to a form. Earlier books contained a series of sonnets in the doomed voice of jazz pianist and addict Bill Evans or a lengthy run of Pessoa-esque diary entries. Sober Ghost feels less deliberate. Which is not to suggest a sense of untidiness or lack of discipline, but rather the breadth of feeling in these pages and their author’s urgent need to connect. In this book, more so than any other, Skinner recalls a seasoned boxer cycling through combinations it took years to master, hitting us right where we left ourselves open, leaving us breathless.
Author Josh English’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, Hobart, and Black Warrior Review. He lives and works in Louisville, KY.
Gulf Stream Magazine 