Jeff Friedman: BLACK THREADS

The following paragraphs represent the beginning of Celia Bland’s review of Black Threads by Jeff Friedman, included in Valparaiso Poetry Review’s Fall/Winter 2007-2008 issue (Volume IX, Number 1) released earlier this week.

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It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Jeff Friedman is a master ventriloquist and Black Threads, his fourth collection of poetry, an anthology of entwined yet disharmonic voices. Many poems in Black Threads are from the perspectives of mythic figures, family members and strays of all kinds. These poems entrust themselves to the reader like confidences whispered in a willing ear. In describing impediments impossible for people to overcome—the entropy they endure and call their lives—Friedman displays a political consciousness that takes as its subject those who live among “the alien corn” (as in the poem “Miriam”), the exiles who can’t speak the native tongue, longing for home. Friedman’s poetry gives them voice.

The collection begins with “The Golem in the Suburbs,” in which the legendary golem,

. . . raised . . .
from the dust, from four letters
of the alphabet repeated in the right

sequence seven times
from the secret names of God . . .

is described like any teenage boy spawned by an uncaring father, roaming a housing development. This golem, however, has killed his maker and the loneliness of the monstrous is conveyed in unadorned details:

I stumble through the suburbs, looking
for someone I can talk to, but no one
comes out of the silent wood houses.

The poet delicately balances the fantastic and the banal, the ordinary and the magical. Friedman is writing poems that are fully realized by the details of grief or displacement. The poet blesses his characters, as Coleridge described it, “unawares”—unbidden and unthanked but with a deep understanding. These people—“Dorothy / who still drives, but only to the synagogue for free lunches” (“Clocks”); the salesman “thumbing through / a thumb-size version of the Testament and marking in red the passages he would use to make his sales pitch to the goyim” (“The Long Heat Wave”); and the fallen angel, who speaks the language of his new home, “in the streets or in the stores, but only / with great effort, and . . . they mocked him” (“The Surviving Angel”)—are members of the silent majority to use Nixon’s famous phrase not to refer to obdurate conservatives but to the stolidly suffering. The unwilling survivors . . ..

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I recommend that readers visit the new issue of VPR for the rest of Celia Bland’s review. Also, the new issue of VPR includes a sampling of Jeff Friedman’s poetry, “Night of the Bat.”