CLAY MATTHEWS. Muffler. H_ngm_n B_oks. 2005. $6

reviewed by JUSTIN MARKS

Clay Mathews opens Muffler, his chapbook from H_ngm_an B_oks, with an epigraph from Johnny Cash’s classic song, “One Piece at a Time.” The song is about an auto factory worker who spends years stealing car parts from the factory to build his own car. When he finally has all the parts and puts the car together, he finds that the parts he’s taken from different makes and models over several years do not fit together properly. Undaunted, the worker makes modifications, drills the parts out to make them fit together until he has “that engine running just like a song.”

As far as epigraph’s go, Mathews’ choice is interesting because he’s essentially telling us his poems, like the car in the song, are not perfectly crafted, cutting edge, or even beautiful objects. But at the same time, the way they work, the way these disparate part have been forced together, is what’s special about them. It’s what’s supposed to make them pleasing as poems (what makes them run like songs).

By and large, this is true. Matthew’s poems have a looseness to them (one could even say, sloppiness) that, when the poems succeed, is very exciting. Take, for instance, the opening of the wonderful “Poem Ending with Hands on the Handlebars”:

Scared means knowing your name is written

in a book somewhere, knowing the wasps

will return next summer for another round,

that the feeling you get on a cliff’s edge is not the fear

of falling but jumping—of taking one step

and not even leaving a crumpled excuse.

“The feeling you get on a cliff’s edge is not the fear of falling but jumping” is not the most original or moving line, nor sentiment. One could even argue it’s a bit of a cliché. Matthews saves it, however, by following up with the rather heartbreaking “of taking one step and not even leaving a crumpled excuse.” The “trick” as the somewhat whimsical title alludes, is risking cliché and failure (taking one’s hands off the handlebars), but somehow righting/writing the poem into something exciting that lands securely (with “hands on the handlebars”).

There are times, as I alluded to earlier, in which certain poems don’t work out quite so well. “Werewolves of the Family Album” is an attempt to use the movie Teen Wolf as a launch pad for a poem about childhood, but the tenor and vehicle feel too forced. The same could be said of “Self Portrait in the Last Rib.” It’s not that these poems are bad. But given the quality of the rest of the poems in Muffler, these two just don’t quite come together.