Doomstead Days
by Brian Teare
Nightboat Books, 2019
Review by Emily Spencer
The initial draw to review the 2019 National Book Award longlisted Doomstead Days by Brian Teare was to, during these times of illness and injustice in 2020, witness a poet’s take on the apocalypse and how that expresses itself formally—a memento mori, a cautionary tale for catharsis, a confession, a relief from mono-optimism that muzzles.
Yes, Teare delivers an apocalyptic urban landscape confronted by nature encroaching, but there are many Doomstead Days reviews that reflect upon this, focusing on the final poem “Doomstead Days,” in which the apocalyptic future blooms optimistically with the end of gender differentiation as an equalizing thread, linking us back to each other and to nature, to the entire ecosystem—to shared interest.
Yet, what was more striking about Teare’s text was the totally unexpected ars poetica, a shift of gears to make an observation on the supremacy of the obsessively (forced) unthoughtful observation in the speaker’s poetry and society, a dangerous tuning out to why the world is the way the world is. Furthermore, Teare composes a book of poetry that dismantles this outlook with renga-inspired riffing off of cold hard facts (dates, place names, statistics, images) and warm/ hot ruminations in “Clear Water Renga” and “Toxics Release Inventory (An Essay on Man).”
Teare oscillates between the well-lineated fact and image delivery deployed in three-line haiku- inspired triplet stanzas in “Clear Water Renga” and “Toxics Release Inventory,” in the form of “internal bleeding/ & indefinite headaches/ in oil cleanup crews,” followed by the deployment of “life against itself::/ I can’t forget how we’ve made/ a poison nature’s// second nature, how the, real/ seems dependent on this fact::” Although there is so much beauty to reflect on here, the revelation of the speaker is in the confession of not being able to forget these details, these observations. Why not?
Teare notes that fear undergirds the desire not to make keener observations, especially of his own feelings, “to face the weird sure feeling/ of being alive// & always under-/ mined, unsure if suspicion/ & resistance will/ just undermine me.”
Structurally, the book is divided into long poems that use image as evidence in increasingly more impassioned ways. However, the strength of the text is the movement of the mind from a cool stoic “Western” thinker who does not know—obsessively, who does not feel—compulsively, who won’t take a stance—desperately, who only sees until the truth of feeling, thought, and contextualized reality emerges from the details, from the images isolated with horse blinders on, until the images are so apocalyptic that they make meaning of themselves:
“with her kids/who can’t/breathe without medical bills /totaling thousands ::”
A shift:
“I write down asthma/ cluster, environmental/ racism, under-”
And is this really a shift or just a completed observation, more detailed?
Asthma is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a respiratory condition “causing difficulty breathing” that is “usually connected to allergic reaction.” What is society allergic to? What is the war without that is now within us?
One cannot help but to think about how this 2019 book speaks to poetry books of the past, of the 1930 photo of a lynching in Claudia Rankine’s 2014 Citizen, in which Rankine reflects on white spectatorship as racist masochism. Certainly, America has a sickness of the gaze, of perception, of looks-based oppression. We are only getting sicker. We are crying out in poetry for recovery.
One cannot help but to think about how this 2019 book is still ultra-relevant in 2020. One cannot help but to think of the observed facts on the news, in social media, and in living color of the deaths of the unarmed Black men Eric Garner and George Floyd, of the unarmed Black men and women—such as Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery—whose lives were taken away by police officers and faux-vigilantes in America, of the war of racism and bigotry upon humanity. One cannot help but to think of COVID-19, of the Black Mountain poets’ emphasis on the breath and the poetic line as breath, of Nathaniel Mackey’s harmelohrhythmopoetic (music-ekphrastic) lecture on “Breath and Precarity” in poetry and jazz, of movement seven: “Eric Garner: I Can’t Breathe” of The Seven Last Words of the Unarmed by Joel Thompson performed by the Morehouse College Glee Club directed by Dr. David E. Morrow, of Jennifer Sinor’s essay “Breathing to Write,” of the breath catching in the back of the world’s throat.
Today, Teare’s Doomstead Days is an observation on and practice beyond the Western, Eastern, and American cult of shallow-novel “observation” and “witness” in which critical thinking, creative reimagining, and empathetic feeling—humanity—is restored by Teare to the observer and, thus, the world. Is that mindset our solution, our saving breath?