Bruce Bond
Vault
The Ashland Poetry Press
Reviewer: Lee Rossi
Bruce Bond has written thirty-seven books. A recent book, Vault, published in 2023, is the first I’ve read. What have I been missing? I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of discovering a writer in mid- or late career, whose latest work compels us to go back and read everything they’ve ever written. For me Tony Hoagland was one such writer. Also William Gibson. Is Bruce Bond another?
Maybe. Maybe it’s too soon for me to know. In business school I learned about “barriers to entry” (I think that’s what they’re called). The idea is that if you want to get into a business you need to expend a certain amount of money and effort, and different businesses have different barriers to entry. Getting into the steel business or the electric car business requires billions of dollars and pals in government who can send big-money subsidies your way. Opening a taco stand is a lot cheaper and quicker. In the world of literary endeavor, you might compare writing a novel to building a steel mill, writing a poem to a taco stand. The trouble with poetry is the number of taco stands; not even a lifetime is time enough to sample all those tacos. And don’t they begin to taste the same?
Happily, Bruce Bond’s poems have a very distinctive taste. Smart, and tart. The title of the book seems to valorize ambivalence and ambiguity. Are we looking at a place for storing treasure, a Fort Knox of the soul? Or a mausoleum? Or are we looking at memory, where sadness and solace can rest side by side. Fragments of narrative leap from these pages, but no narrative arc. We learn that “A wave machine calmed my mother with its sighs,” and then that “the water took her.” (“Water Path”). Similarly numinous—or is it revenant—is the observation: “When Glenn Gould touched his first piano, / he pressed just one key.” After those lines the poem abandons the pianist, focusing instead on the listener in whom:
a little of you dies to hear,
to meet,
as waves and papers do,
the hush of shore.
Bond has a fascination with the way appearances begin to disappear almost as soon as they arrive” “Out of every dissonance, / another.”. Images dissolve as quickly as waves.
What lingers then? Trauma lingers: the Covid pandemic, the Shoah. Sex lingers, and its attendant guilt and disappointment. Again in “Water Path,” he recounts an early sexual encounter:
When the older boy took me, confused
into his mouth,
he moaned
as if I were melting,
I sank, in him, my pride,
That’s what he said,
and a seam inside my bloodstream closed.
What is that “seam?” “Let be be finale of seem,” Wallace Stevens insisted. The seam closes, and the boy rises into adult being? Maybe. I’m not sure.
Bond is a poet intensely aware that, as Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In the title sequence, he conjures Berlin, “the vaulted ceilings of Bavaria,” “the railcar dark,” “a number in the skin,” “the needle / to stain a skin cell blue,” only to conclude:
What does not kill me makes each
night sweat
the pretext of an understanding.
Haunted by history, the poet proposes a pretense of wisdom, but what he really knows is suffering, pure and simple.
Similarly, his reflections on the pandemic (“The Dark Casino”) become a nightmarish vision of Las Vegas. Mingling showgirls, children who are killers, the Angel of Death (from Exodus), Tantalus, “little heads in boxes,” “a fever / that killed everything it touched.” He concludes:
What was once a playground
turned into a bedroom of monsters
so alone they knew nothing of their loneliness.
And yet despite the alienation, fear and isolation, a longing for communion persists:
As if the two of you might make good
sense in a room of monitors,
each word exhumed from a common flesh.
Isn’t it the Gospel of John which announces the Word made Flesh? Here the Word is resurrected from our common flesh, the flesh of which we are all made.
For all his insistence on our inescapable loneliness, Bond affirms the unity of all being. Though he does not testify directly, Bond seems a deeply religious poet, or as we like to say in these post-religious times, a deeply spiritual poet. Every day we are disappointed in God. We might even say that God’s business is to disappoint his creatures. “Divine light is cold” (“The Curve of the Open Page”), Bond tells us, shortly before invoking “the bullet in the car door, the choir / of the slaughtered.” No way to escape the realities of cruelty and racism; for example, the murders in the AME church. And yet he enjoins us to “Make that the door to a larger context.” Or, as he declares a few pages later, “The ship on the horizon tells you, the edge is no edge. / More a beneficent falling off.”
John of the Cross limned the notion of a dark night of the soul, and later writers, religious and secular, have wrestled with a similar sense of aridity and meaninglessness. This is that kind of book. Besides John of the Cross, Bond has many companions to help guide him through this treacherous territory. Although I couldn’t find Virgil or Dante, I did notice some of their more recent followers, e.g. Eliot with his Waste Land and Rilke with his all too human angels. And what about Wim Wenders? And yet for all the nods to the Bible, this is a secular hymn. This world is our hell and our heaven, says Bond, where all who are burdened with loss kneel “to teach the heavens what it is to grieve” (“Canoe”). We humans invented loss (aren’t we clever?) and reinvent it with every new life.
