The Matter of the Casket

Poems by Thom Ward

ISBN 9781933456690

Read: 2008 June 4 - 6

Reviewed: 2008 June 28

Viannah gave me this book for my birthday. It is an autograph, dated January 10, 2008.

These are “prose poems” meaning, apparently, that they are intense and condensed, but do not necessarily follow any particular meter or rhyme, at least not on purpose.

Ward likes to personify things, like bottles of vodka or caskets, or the sky, or the Almighty, in order to get a perspective, in order to have them speak from a point of view. The things they say are clever commentary on our life here and now, admirable for poetry.

Despite all this speaking, nowhere in the book is there a quotation mark. Ward doesn’t appear to believe in them.

After establishing some context with various speakers, maybe a narrator, maybe an angel, maybe a fire hydrant or a dollar or a pair of feet, once some context is established, there will often be a twist ending, often murderous.

The final, title, piece of the collection deals itself with death:

Statement

He said he wanted to be the only one at his interment. Of course, he didn’t count on the sky showing up, a clump of grey, or one pop of thunder like the burst of a pistol. A few daisies stretched their necks to get a glimpse of the sun, which, respecting his statement, refused to glare. Beneath the pile of dirt, the grass tried to move its green fingers. Three crows watched from the branches of an oak. Gravestones waited. A congregation of nothing’s everything. Or was it he said he wanted to be the only thing at his funeral. Admirable, perhaps. But there is always the matter of the casket.

This isn’t the best or the most memorable of the poems, but it is representative. Who would think of the grass under the pile of dirt. A subtlety: the difference between “one” and “thing.”