Review: Universal Monsters
Universal Monsters
Bryan Dietrich
Word Press
2007
Great movies are usually afforded sequels, great bands have sophomore albums and great writers, if we’re lucky, get the opportunity to have second books. Well, in 2007 luck was on our side. Coming out of Word Press, Bryan Dietrich’s second poetry collection Universal Monsters is a much more personal, intimate work than the award-winning Krypton Nights. With Universal Monsters the poet switches off the fireball machine, unplugs the floating head and booming voice gizmo and, in a very gentle, intimate way, steps from behind the curtain to speak for himself.
Universal Monsters is, in many ways, the logical evolution of a persona poet and his art. Blending fantasy and reality, Hollywood and home, persona and the personal, this collection has a sweeping, impressive range of movement that closes the distance between poet the many persona with which he can speak. Universal Monsters’ cast of characters includes mummies, monsters, mythical and missing peoples, aliens and, standing tall among these wondrous entities, a boy who, stanza by stanza, eases into the eerie, frightening world of adulthood. While this collection is still loaded with vivid, musical persona, it is the poems written simply in the voice of Bryan Dietrich that make this collection different from the standard book.
From a craft perspective, Universal Monsters is a shining example of how a single collection can encompass a sprawling assembly of characters and, still, manage to march diligently towards a single, well-defined goal. It’s quite apparent that Dietrich is a fan (and master) of the fixed form—sonnet in particular. And Universal Monsters is ripe with both metered and free verse poetry successes. With the poem “The Thing That Couldn’t Die” Dietrich, as a boy, watches the slow, day to day battles of parents trying to find and maintain love. All of this is done in a splendidly moving free verse. Hot on its heels is a sonnet cycle delving into Egyptian mythology, a cycle which uses the family structure of the Egyptian mythos to resonate with the complex family exploration offered up by “The Thing That Couldn’t Die” only a few pages ago. This ability to resonate and reverberate themes and emotional gravitas is the beauty of Universal Monsters and a calling card of Brian Dietrich.
But lots of poets are writing lots of good work. So why am I writing a review of Universal Monsters as opposed to one of those other books? Simple: every genre needs fresh air. All those other books that I could be writing about are just like every other book of poetry you’ve ever read. And, quite frankly, I think that’s part of the reason why poetry isn’t read as often as it should be. But it’s books like Universal Monsters that remind us of what poetry can be: boundless, inclusive, dynamic, able to speak for us and to us in the same resonant, whispered voice.
Overall Rating: 4 out of 5
You’ll like this if you’re interested in: persona poetry, sonnets, blank verse, free verse, monster movies, Hollywood monsters, mythology
Where to find it: amazon.com, many large retailers
Sample:
The Creature Walks Among Us
First, the house lights dim. The uncertain scream
of a stage door open. Then the curtain.
A boy wanders in, the kind who reads Creepy
by owl nightlight. Letting sneakers linger, appalled
but complicit at the head’s threshold, he follows
the sound, feels his way with hands flexed out before,
clumsy as a clubfoot mummy. The shower
shakes. A soapy scrim shoots back along its rod.
Now the skull, green as corpse gas, appears.
Hovering, gap-grinned, lip-lost. The hunt is on.
When, in the tall dark, my father would fade
into the flicker of bathroom fluorescents,
a bulge bigger than usual blistering
out under his shirt, I always knew that
came next. Father augury, fancy magic.
How many times—lusting after what, at seven,
I suppose I only half understood
of the grave—how many times did I ask,
“Daddy, do the skull thing,” pray for him
to steal into the closet, remove that molded
tomb jockey from its case and chase me down?
Along the hall, braving blind turns, through rooms
tricked to treachery by sunlessness and sister
litter, it, he, would dog my heels, the skull
scraping tracer lines, designs, across the dark
the way tree-dwelling owls trail fungal phosphor.
Signs of our own night flight lingered only
in what placed we’d left, while the skull, my skull,
my father’s plastic mastery, haunted me still.
And ah, how I’d run, fretted to a fitful pitch,
tuned, twinned inside my head, shadowing
the shadows there, reflecting all—aglow
with terror and delight—I begged him for.
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