The Man Suit, Zachary Schomburg. Boston, Massachusetts:
Black Ocean Press, 2007, 112 pages,$12.95, paper back.
Review by Matt McBride
Try to imagine what your local newspaper would be like if it was edited by Donald Barthelme and you might wind up with something akin to Zachary Schomburg’s first book, a collection of prose poems called The Man Suit. Schomburg is uniquely tuned into what is nascent in the world: the potential of the woman on the phone to be made of porcelain or a gramophone to interpret your thoughts as opera. However, Schomburg is ultimately reporting on our world, and though gorillas may be able to play the Wurlitzer, the tune is rather somber.
Schomburg begins the collection with what might best be described as domestic fables, Aesop if he lived in Saginaw. In one, we are told of the man with a back full of knives. In “Full of Knives,” Schomburg writes, “He sleeps facedown every night in a chalk outline of himself…When he walks, he sounds like a tree still full of dead leaves holding on.” In his two telephones series, the first of three serial poems in the book, we’re told that:
The white telephone is God. There are only a handful of people with the telephone number. Its ring is infinitely loud. This is what killed the dinosaurs.
Schomburg’s stark appraisal of history is also emblematic of another theme set off in the first section of the book, that of denuding. People and things are constantly being opened up or exposed as something else. We learn, for instance, that Marlene, to whom the narrator refers often, is actually made of snow and that inside the hollowed out opera singer grows a copse of trees.
However, Schomburg’s world isn’t absurdist or escapist. As we learn in his series “Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene,” it’s a place tempered by violence. Schomburg writes:
A string of fish. A blood-splattered tuba. A golden egg. A live nativity scene. An artist painting this. Rhubarb pie. A floating bathtub. Booth’s nub for a hand, blood-spattered. Lincoln’s discarded leg braces, aflame.
If such revisionist history seems dismissive, we should ask ourselves how often is the violence in the news contextualized, if it ever could be? In another poem, he writes:
Lincoln’s outstretched and blood-spattered arm. Lincoln’s revolver and the large pale hand he held it in. Gun smoke curling upward. This is just before Lincoln used three bullets to kill a few audience members below and before turning the revolver on himself. A plate of crayfish.
While the poems are surreal, their opacity doesn’t accentuate the difference between his violence and ours, but rather the similarities.
In the final section of the book, we begin to see how the discrepancies between the narrator’s expectations of the world and reality have begun to affect the speaker. While the denizens of Schomburg’s world are always on the verge of blossoming, many times they don’t. This is best evidenced by the last poem in the collection, “A Voice Box with Words Still in It,” where the narrator is offered a voice box found in the throat of a sheep. Expecting to hear tales of bucolic bliss, the narrator blows into the box. Schomburg writes, “Me: [I take a shallow breath and blow]. I am dying, so cold without wool, and afraid.” What comes out is less like Little House on the Prairie and more like Berryman’s ”Snowline.”
The Man Suit is an unbelievably well-wrought first collection of poems. While many poets today operate in a sort of symbolist, surrealist, associative realm, too many fall prey to excessive artifice and wordplay. Schomburg is a writer who reminds us that reality is what underlies Surrealism.
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