Hazmat

by J.D. McClatchy

HAZMAT, meaning “hazardous material,” is an abbreviation familiar from signs at the entrances to long dark tunnels or on the sides of suspicious containers. Here, in a series of stunning poems, J. D. McClatchy examines the first hazmat we all our own bodies. The virtuosic “Tattoos” meditates on why we decorate the body’s surface, while other poems plunge daringly inward, capturing the way in which everything that makes us human–desire and decay, need and curiosity, the jarring sense of loss and mortality–hovers in the flesh. In the midst of it all is the heart, its treacheries, its gnawing grievances, its boundless capacities.

With their stark titles (“Cancer,” “Feces,” “Jihad”), McClatchy’s poems work dazzling variations on this book’s how we live with the fact that we will die. Crowned by the twenty-part sequence “Motets,” which deals out an exquisite hand of emotional crises, this collection brings us a sumptuous weave of impassioned thought and clear-sighted feeling. Holding up a powerful poetic mirror, McClatchy shows us our very selves in a chilling series of the melodrama of the body being played out, as it must be, in the theater of the spirit.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

96 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

McClatchy is an adjunct professor at Yale University and editor of the Yale Review. He also edits the "Voice of the Poet" series for Random House AudioBooks.

His book Hazmat (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) was nominated for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. He has written texts for musical settings, including eight opera libretti, for such composers as Elliot Goldenthal, Daron Hagen, Lowell Liebermann, Lorin Maazel, Tobias Picker, Ned Rorem, Bruce Saylor, and William Schuman. His honors include an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1991). He has also been one of the New York Public Literary Lions, and received the 2000 Connecticut Governor’s Arts Award.

In 1999, he was elected into the membership of The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in January 2009 he was elected president. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1987), the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets (1991). He served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1996 until 2003. (Wikipedia)

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite poems were the ones with the bluntest titles: "Penis," "Feces," and especially "Tattoos." Even the poems I forgot about, though, I turn back to and admire the compression of the language and his ability to surprise. For instance, in "Tankas," which felt a little like filler, there is this really funny little scene:

The Starbucks counter.
A pierced, swishy, tie-dyed head,
His finger stirring

A latte, jokes with the monk
About saffron withdrawal.

I also liked "Ouija," a long poem that closes the book and tells the story of a group of gay men reading a Ouija board while rained into a vacation home. As in all his poems, you can glance at this one and find really fabulous lines: "Roach clip. Jug wine. The conventional aids" ; "Doggedly the acolyte buttonholes the board." In this poem and elsewhere in the book, the language has a really cutting, bitchy quality that I both delight in and wince at:

Then C--, whose reedy, wire-rimmed pretense,
Goosed by Southern manners and a French degree,
The saccharine-coated pill B-- had been swallowing
For a decade, insinuates his clubman's smarm
And succeeds in raising static on the line.

This book gave me lots to aspire to. I would recommend it to lovers of poetic form and to those who are interested in queer poetic voices. McClatchy is one of the most authoritative and compelling gay poets I've read.

[Meter]

i really like the ryhmes.