SLEIGH RIDE by JOE FLETCHER
reviewed by MICAH MATTIX

 

 

Factory Hollow Press, 2007.

 

Sleigh Ride, Joe Fletcher's first chapbook, is one of the most interesting and, it seems to me, innovative long poems that has been written in some time. In the poem, Fletcher recounts a young boy's journey with his father through what could be both war-torn Turkey and the American mid-west to a mythical shoreline home where the boy and his father rejoin the child's mother. The boy's stay is short, however, and he sets out again--this time alone and in a boat--to some unknown, but promising destination. While the poem could function as an enactment of the movement from childhood to adulthood or innocence to experience, or perhaps evan an instance of the sublime, this is not what makes Sleigh Ride such an interesting poem. 
While some of the events of Sleigh Ride are domestic--a mother reading to her son in bed, a father working the basement to "the whine of a band-saw," or a child stroking the "bulbous flanks" of two ink black horses--, Fletcher introduces fantastic events piecemeal as the poem progresses. The material world in the poem, however, remains very much our world, and Fletcher allows us to see the world in a way that is new and exciting, surrounded, as it is, with a magical aura of the fantastic events of the child's journey, which are not tiresome, because they are, unlike the fantastic in Surrealism, integrated into the story of the poem. 
Fletcher opens the poem, for example, mixing dense descriptive passages of the material world with direct narration of events:

In March there was wind freighted with birdsong.
Among forsythia spray and gray bolts of cloud,
tufted seed pods blew in drifts through undergrowth.
Father emerged form the cellar covered in sawdust,
smelling of resin, sweat beading on his bald, pointed scalp,
pink in the sun like a festering bud. Behind him,
through the cellar doorway, in the gloom penetrated
by his workbench lamp, I glimpsed the enormous flank
of the sleigh he spent his nights constructing while
mother led me down the leaf-shaded avenues of sleep.

The sleigh that the child glimpses will take the father and the child across dry land in early spring, and across time, it seems, as the child oscillates between sleep and wakefulness, to rejoin, or so it seems, the child's mother who disappears soon after the first section. Describing a potentially dangerous part of the journey to the coast, Fletcher writes:

How we swept and veered rushing through the night-damp
tangle of burdock, privet, shaggy vines drooping thick loops
from the canopy. Among the ground-cover of Mayapple,
I saw the pale clenched blossoms of trillia, casting a pearly
translucence to the forest. Not a house to be seen, but at times
I thought I glimpsed a cluster of lights far back among the trees,
and once, fleetingly, a shed with a scab of moss on its tin roof,
a thin silver chimney and a thin silver plume of smoke. A sugar
shack? My mouth began to water. But then we were far away,
racing. Strange shouts in the distance, a unified chanting,
as if a populace were hailing the appearance of a dignified
archstrategist. But each time that noise began father would
also start to shout and sing from atop his driver's box, as
if to distract me from the distant commotion. He was
wearing a magnificent stovepipe hat that remained firmly
perched atop his head despite our terrific speed. It appeared
as if any moment goldfinches and swallowtails and soap-
bubbles would burst from the cylindrical top of that hat
and flutter drunkenly through the spring. Instead the hat
attracted the silent floppy swoop of bats; speeding pellets

Rather than distract from the material world, these contrasts provide definition to our sensory experience of it--contrasts between, for example, the speed of the sleigh and the implausible stillness of the father's hat, the house in the moonlight and its imaginative recasting as a "sugar shack," actual bats and their appearance to the child as "goldfinches and swallowtails and soap- / bubbles," or the shouts of violent crowds and the father's awkward sing-song.
In addition to this, in asking us to accept that fantastic things happen in the poem, Fletcher, in effect, provides himself with a ground for using a heightened diction that, despite one or two faulty lines, is authentic to the poem's occasion. This is one of the great accomplishments of the poem. In the first passage quoted above, for example, phrases such as "wind freighted with birdsong," "tufted seed pods blew in drifts" and "mother led me down the leaf-shaded avenues of sleep" used in an otherwise conventional lyric poem would seem convoluted or archaic. In Sleigh Ride, they seem just right. At one point in the poem, the child eats his bowl, which is made of the "chewy and / fibrous bark of an Adriatic olive," and finds it delicious. One feels that one could do the same with the words of Sleigh Ride, which are perhaps like Wallace Steven's boxes of exotic fruit--strange and multicolored, but distinct, and symbolic of a very real, imaginative world.
Last, Sleigh Ride tells a story--a story that does not distract from the poem as artifact, but functions in this case, it seems to me, as an impetus that returns us to the text itself.  Upon finishing the poem, one is left with the desire to immediately read it again. Perhaps this is the best recommendation that can be given, and one that best summarizes Fletcher's accomplishment in
the poem.