This Present Moment: A Review of Alan Michael Parker's The Age of Discovery

“For Now”, the opening poem of Alan Michael Parker’s The Age of Discovery, is an invitation, rather, an invocation to the reader as the muse whom the poet aims to court. It segues into “When Everyone Wrote a Poem”, a celebratory roll call of the quotidian. That quotidian is the launching pad that jettisons these poems into discovery of the present. The poet’s age, past the middle, I assume, is the book’s age of discovery. Looking in the rearview mirror to perceive the present.

Parker’s collection is all now. Wherever and whenever the speaker travels, is this present moment. Even when the poet is engaged in reading of Neruda and his mistress’ memoir, Matilde Urrutia is singing now, not then. It is a moment of discovery.

The deeper I read into this collection, the deeper I wanted to go. Parker’s concerns are modern life, automation, displacement, the natural world and God. The mundane magic of the poems, their drifting from voice mail to Polish cupcakes to blue as a unit of measure, captured me. Maybe it was their diction, colloquial and conversational. This poet is always talking—to us, himself, a lover, his future self as a hummingbird—mostly to himself.

Parker’s skills are most apparent in his charming handle on simile: “The dogs snooze on the sofa like session drummers. Like hipsters, the houseplants wait for whatever” and “limoncello viscous as the night.” His shortish lines hug the left margin and are often in uniform tercets; no experiments with white space or punctuation. A poem with almost entirely 3-line stanzas might include one or more quatrain or singlet. Form is secondary to the poem. 

“Two Men Disagree, and Row Out to Sea”, opens with “The boat was right for their anger.” This first line, echoed later, has a nursery rhyme bounce and allegorical feel. Its repetition of phrase, of recast line, is reminiscent of a villanelle if Mother Goose had penned a villanelle. Throughout the book, Parker uses repetition deftly. Although the phrase and words that reappear vary, the device creates a familiar pattern and welcome echoes. In the title poem, “and someone” becomes a meme partnered with actions and ways of being that resonate with the speaker and lay bare our connectedness.

Where Parker stands out is with surreal imagery, such as when he writes that watching a painting “was like being a plum”. Or this opening stanza from “Half the World Is Ours”:

Why all the secrets
sewn into the lawns
and into the fields
and into the clouds with needles of light?

Parker has an excellent ear for rhythm and sound that he uses to good purpose. In “The Trains All Arrived”, the stanzas count down 3, 2, 1, in the cadence of a locomotive. The varying meters in these lines from “When I Am a Hummingbird” bounce from iambs to land on a spondee.  

I love the dog who leans
matter-of-fact in her need
and the big smile of the small Pit Bull

The speaker isn’t always alone in these poems. Characters in the poems are often strangers.  The character of the driver in “The Ride” is “a girl who needs a listener”, as she blathers on injecting serious news she must share. Overall, this collection is conversational in tone; big news is dropped in like mail through the slot of the front door.

There is a lot of delight and humor in The Age of Discovery. Comparisons might be made to Billy Collins or Ron Koertge, but Parker is more relaxed than Collins and more acerbic than Koertge. Any sweetness tasted here is mellow, warm, never cloying. Parker’s poems are freewheeling. Less confined to regular lines they may veer into a heady space or the sky or the heart. “Later, Love” opens with “Who among us has just had sex?”

I believe this speaker. As a young reader I gravitated towards James Baldwin and Carson McCullers. It was the authority in their voices, in short stories, novels, essays, that drew me to them. Parker’s voice has a similar effect on me. Out of the blue statements, magical thinking-like, surrealistic, yet I believe them. I hear that voice most loudly and assuredly in “Neruda on Capri”, an 8-part poem. It is the center of book literally and figuratively. It is part narrative, part meditation and borrows lines from Matilde Urrutia’s memoir.

On the heels of “Neruda on Capri” comes “A Fable for the Lost”. I wondered if it is a commentary on the preceding poem. After the less formal shape of the Neruda poem, this “Fable” is bold on the page with tercets leading with anaphora, opening phrases that act like an incessant kickstart to what the fable might possibly be about.

The litany of “Egypt, North Carolina” takes a turn in the second unprayer-like stanza:

Soon, it will be my time.
I’ll take out the trash,
ill-fated as any Pharaoh,
and stand myself in the can.

“The New World” follows with the humming of a hymn and an unknown woman crossing herself. The world, or at least the speaker’s reality, becomes an ark for this collection of the public that is a diner. Parker holds a taut line here where we, prodded by TV—a character in this poem—cannot surrender our suspicion that someone has a gun.

“When the Moon Was a Boy” repeats phrases and we hear another nursery rhyme at its core.

and he wanted to give the sun a pear,
and he wanted to give the wind a pear,
and he wanted to give the rain a pear,

The speaker in these poems has been around the sun long enough to know what daybreak can bring. “Hold still, the whole scene says, before the sun drives in the first nail”, he writes in “Aubade with Two Deer”. Lacking nostalgia, the poems have a knowing wisdom that is sometimes self-mocking and at other times exquisitely, magically sage. Knowing what daylight can bring, means knowing what it has brought. These are twilight poems. Anyone who has had a colonoscopy understands the twilights that its process and its anesthesia evoke—being of an age to have the procedure and the quasi-existence of the twilight sedation where one is sort of aware, but not really. Therefore, Parker’s “Psalm”, which is akin to a Shaker hymn, is a perfect ending for this collection. It is a bedtime story, a kiss goodnight.