Words for What those Men Have Done by Richard Newman (Guernica Editions, 2017) 121pp. $20
Review by Pramila Venkateswaran
“Sex is beautiful when you love the body you are making love to;” it is sacred—a surrender akin to spiritual revelation—“once I’m in /I’ll never need to be / anywhere else.” But when sex is used to violate a human being, it cripples the soul; it is spirit shattering. In response to such violation, Richard Newman writes these poems in Words for what Those Men have Done as a message to his son (although only the final poem is called “Prayer to my Son”) who will need to make a decision, as all men would have to, regarding his allegiance to the victim or the violator. It is frightening that all human beings have the potential to violate another: Newman catalogues the horrific sexual atrocities women suffer “elsewhere;” all the elsewheres mirror the gross violation that is always around the corner on one’s own street, in one’s own house. Newman’s poems startle us with this revelation. In poem after poem, Newman delves into the nature of violence, how male desire turns to control over another human being. And the most startling is the poet facing his own vulnerability and wondering how to love despite being traumatized and how to love without violating another. “Because I Can’t Not Know what I Saw” makes us cringe as we read the details such as “though certainly he raped her / for the sword hilt rising / from between her parted thighs…” However, this description of violence is offset by the knowledge and experience of intimacy in “It Must Include the Body,” where the poet uses imagery from nature to describe the lovers’ encounter: “you whispered / that the breeze was like the water’s breath / just before it touched its tongue to you, / and when I kissed the lips / you shaped those words with, / you came, calling your pleasure / out to the open sea.”
As if to show what intimacy really looks like, Newman with bold strokes takes us to the edge of longing and fulfilment, or shocks us with desire’s arrest. In “Clean,” the early memory of sexual assault muddies the innocent sexual encounter, until the self is able to “answer / to a summons” and is released. Images of violence from childhood are suggested in the “inch thick slab of blood red meat,” “stepfather’s hand / raised in the narrow kitchen,” and classmates “forcing me up against the wall”. The shape-shifting memories of childhood offer us a surreal picture of a young Jewish boy’s experience growing up in New York, with memories sometimes stark, sometimes hazy and dream-like. The poet offers us the questions he has grown up with, such as “Are you Jewish enough?” This question of ethnic identity merges with the question regarding male sexuality as well as how to live in the face of violence, how to bring a boy child into the world and save him from himself.
Answering his own ponderings, Newman discovers that redemption lies in the imagination and empathetic identification with the other as we see in many poems, such as “Gender Politics” and “I Still Don’t Know where he is Buried.” We are witness to beautiful lines such as in “Making it Mine,” where the speaker sets the butterflies free “grateful / to have felt on my flesh / the small wind of its living” and at the end of the poem, he realizes that “the skin / of the life I hadn’t caught / that day became my skin.” Newman’s book is haunting and is necessary in the present time when men are trying to understand the nature of masculinity and intimacy in a world where conventional notions of gender fail to be meaningful.
As if to show what intimacy really looks like, Newman with bold strokes takes us to the edge of longing and fulfilment, or shocks us with desire’s arrest. In “Clean,” the early memory of sexual assault muddies the innocent sexual encounter, until the self is able to “answer / to a summons” and is released. Images of violence from childhood are suggested in the “inch thick slab of blood red meat,” “stepfather’s hand / raised in the narrow kitchen,” and classmates “forcing me up against the wall”. The shape-shifting memories of childhood offer us a surreal picture of a young Jewish boy’s experience growing up in New York, with memories sometimes stark, sometimes hazy and dream-like. The poet offers us the questions he has grown up with, such as “Are you Jewish enough?” This question of ethnic identity merges with the question regarding male sexuality as well as how to live in the face of violence, how to bring a boy child into the world and save him from himself.
Answering his own ponderings, Newman discovers that redemption lies in the imagination and empathetic identification with the other as we see in many poems, such as “Gender Politics” and “I Still Don’t Know where he is Buried.” We are witness to beautiful lines such as in “Making it Mine,” where the speaker sets the butterflies free “grateful / to have felt on my flesh / the small wind of its living” and at the end of the poem, he realizes that “the skin / of the life I hadn’t caught / that day became my skin.” Newman’s book is haunting and is necessary in the present time when men are trying to understand the nature of masculinity and intimacy in a world where conventional notions of gender fail to be meaningful.
