Reviewed by Abigail Holstein
2.16.07

“In the poem we want to try to set off a light each time/ the door of the closet is closed,” writes Matthew Zapruder in The Pajamaist, his second book of poetry. Like the light in the closet, Zapruder’s poems illuminate familiar, unassuming, inconspicuous subjects. For Zapruder, these closets are never merely closed, and he seeks to expose the unexpectedly unfamiliar in them: “the closet is holding something…the garments are thinking.” What he brings to light comes with its own hidden thoughts that inspire him to reach further into the dark. This process of reconsidering his subjects shape Zapruder’s poems and is the source of their meaning. He asks us to seek what we couldn’t expect to find, to cast a light into the all-too-familiar dark, even if what we find at the end of the poem is still “just out of reach.”

What Zapruder demands of himself and his readers is that we keep reaching through the poem, beyond the final lines. In “There Is a Light” for example, the poem tells a story of spying and desire: “Whenever behind your windows I look/ from my balcony down at you you are open, /…and each time your doors /part my lips hydraulical/ silently clatter…” Zapruder waits until we know he is in love before he reveals the object of his affection: a “maternal albanian market.” Like the thinking garments, the curious seductive power of the market lures the poet in for a closer look. Zapruder finds the market to be at once “maternal,” giving birth to “placenta,” and “to etcetera’s/ every pleasure in every hour;” it is a “most magnificent pregnant man” who climaxes in a series of births, or “gives birth to the story of you/ giving birth to the story of me/ giving birth to my awe of you.” Each incarnation of the market enthralls Zapruder, but its greatest allure for him is the way it is transformed as he moves closer to it, becoming its lover, its mother. The shift in focus at the close of the poem to the human mother comes suddenly enough for Zapruder to transfer what he has seen in the market onto her, “young and free/ who with pale green arabic music/ leaking from one of her earrings.” She “turns into her drifting toward/ the opposite and therefore holy direction,” revealing yet another facet of the market, of seduction. As she “turns into” the end of the poem, we follow her gaze out past its edge.

Zapruder is not afraid to reach into the dark of his own assumptions either. In “Canada,” he claims, “I have always hated Canada,” and complains, “Canada gets along with everyone/ while I hang, a dark cloud/ above the schoolyard.” His resentment of the good-natured Canada annoys and embarrasses him. Naming what drives him crazy about our northern neighbor leads him to confess his own shortcomings: “I have pity but no respect for others, /which is not compassion, just ordinary/ love based on attitudes towards myself.” It is an unexpected turn away from the Canada-bashing; but he comes to an even more unexpected conclusion: “and it’s clear/ that the whole country does not exist/ to make me feel crappy/ like a candelabra hanging/ above the prison world, / condemned to freely glow.”

The most familiar, and iconic, darkness in Zapruder’s collection is post 9/11 New York, which he explores in a series entitled ”Twenty Poems for Noelle.” In this series, Zapruder not only illuminates the hidden unfamiliar city, but also captures the feeling of a secret truth exposed. The fourth poem begins “Independence Day, the sky/ on high alert:

…people act that way
on the street when their team
spectacularly has fallen
holding its shin or some
thing european, …
fall down in a beautiful tantrum
the city parentally ignores…
I say the more diligently
they fuck with us
the more american we get

Zapruder conveys the delicate energy of the holiday, how at any moment laughter can turn to tears. The intensity of the moment explodes in the fall of the athlete, in all, a “beautiful tantrum” that is “parentally” ignored by the city.

Zapruder suggests (even before we get to the last lines) that the fervor and emotion of the holiday is stimulated from something outside the scene—“some/ thing european.” At first glance, his last three lines give off a violent, reactionary blast, perhaps a swing at that instigating other. And yet, it is Independence Day and what is more American than having the “sky on high alert?” Zapruder calls attention to both the fire and its fuel, and most importantly, the rapacious relationship between them; the instigating other is as much a part of the poem’s celebration as the holiday itself.

The poem begins at a high-pitch and races even higher; it’s the sound of our fear grating against our confidence, our pleasure against our pride. As the energy in the poem tips into a “tantrum” we realize how close we are to our own demise, a secret we that we had so expertly hidden before 9/11. Once again, Zapruder pushes us into the darkness, this time, with a loaded challenge to turn on the light.

The Pajamaist is an impressively inventive collection, but there are places in which the poet’s innovation and experiment with syntax make for jarring, tangled lines that are so inaccessible, they dissuade the reader from trying to puzzle them out. That said, the most inventive poem, the title poem, is also the most transparent. This prose poem records the poet’s dream of an imaginary novel he’s writing called The Pajamaist. In it, he envisions a cure for suffering: “We only had to sleep in each other’s pajamas…” and follows an almost-logical path to the end of dream, almost-imagining the final answers to the flaws in his plan.

In all, these poems glow with understanding. Pushing back into a new space we did not know was there, Zapruder illuminates his subjects to see what else might be hidden. His poems inspire his readers to reach “for the long poem inside us.”