The Two-ness of Things, a review of Matthew Minicucci’s DUAL by Carlene Gadapee
Dual
Matthew Minicucci
Acre Books (2023)
102 pp.
Matthew Minicucci’s Dual asks us to consider poetry, and indeed, lived experience, with an eye toward a both/and instead of an either/or construct. In this fine collection of poems, Minicucci confronts both social and personal issues with a master’s touch, often employing stories and poetry of the past juxtaposed with contemporary settings and conflicts. He also uses the space on the page to clearly demonstrate how ideas and considerations are both bifurcated and intertwined. Minicucci is a master craftsman, using words for nuance and connotation, while keeping a tight and intentional focus on syntax and meaning. This text invites the reader to consider not only what they think they believe about social issues, but also to reach deeply into their own poem-craft and educational toolbox. In this way, Dual brings fresh ideas and understandings to the fore, while paying true homage to the poets of the past.
Arranged in sections, this collection challenges the reader to pay close and considered attention. Minicucci is a consummate wordsmith, and it is the particularity of details that creates the structure of the poems. In this way, they surprise, they sing, they question, and they invite the reader in, again and again. The first poem, “Dual,” is a discrete section of its own, but marked out by letters of the Greek alphabet. The speaker considers the notion of duality, how it is the “not singular, not plural of things.” This idea controls the collection; we are charged with contemplating the two-ness of things, how they fit, the interplay between them, but as both separate and distinct parts.
The second section is titled Thirteen Ways of Looking West, and this, of course, calls to mind Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” The movement in Stevens’ poem is astonishing; through the readers’ lens, we track external and internal shifts, physical and philosophical settings, and come to an unsettled conclusion by the end of the poem. In many ways, Minicucci’s work here is related to that series of shifts, as well. The hallmarks of this section lie in the use of sound and the strange juxtaposition between titles and subject matter in the poems. The titles reference specific, physical locations, and they often begin with a gerund, an action that indicates what the poet-speaker was doing or where he was when the poem was conceived. The poems themselves are written in columns, some with more white space than others, but all can be read, at least in part, both across the divide and down the columns. In this way, each poem beckons: come back, what else is there to see? To understand? To be puzzled by? The mystery and imagery, coupled with concrete, specific titles, create the duality of the poems.
There are strangely evocative turns in the poems, as well. For example, in “Walking the Flood of Fire Trail in Kimberly, OR,” the speaker begins with an image rooted in synesthesia: “what does green sound like?” And then the repetition of sounds takes over, with words like “grief” and “Greek” immediately following. A bit later in the poem, we are asked to “listen for the sun.” It’s strange, it’s interesting, and it is successful in the way that the use of synesthetic phrasing encourages the reader to stop, listen closer, and to participate in the world the poet has created for this short space of time. The next two poems beg to be read aloud; the sounds are dominant and carry the images throughout. Such runs and riffs as “sound swept/ from shoulders to ground… wounds, mostly” and “someone once prayed/ to this might, just a light April spray… like whey… remains of a day…” sweep the reader through the lines of “Considering a Wooden Bridge at Latourell Falls, OR.” The poem ends with “here the sun can’t win, and so/ once again, all of this begins.” On the page, the poem is written with a lot of white space, not quite in columns, but definitely indicating an almost-separation. Duality, indeed.
Minicucci’s deft use of sound and syncopation make the reader sway with the lines, physically. The sound surrounds us: where we are is only an occasion to listen and to record our response. The poem “Waiting at Champs Barbershop in St. Johns, OR” feels like listening to Baker and Mulligan, songs like “Freeway,” or “Love Me or Leave Me.” The sounds are not only engaging, but insistent. Again, this poem, written in columns, can be read both across the divide and down the page. This is an excellent example of the “both/and” quality of these poems.
So how does Matt Minicucci do it? The poems themselves are rooted in foundational grammar; a riff can’t happen without a solid melodic line, and his poems depend on exacting word choice, syntax, and sometimes, even the punctuation used or not used. When those elements are solid, the magic can happen: “the ocean’s just-empty room/ in June; no color at all like tonight’s empty moon” –this is the ending of “Tourists Touching Honu in Punalu’u, HI.”
The next section of the book is titled Ajax, UT, and it takes us to another place, both literally and tonally. This long poem, titled “William Ajax Under [bullet] Round Store,” is sobering; it recounts an underground community that once existed, but now is represented by a historical marker shot up by bullets. The word “bullet” is interjected throughout the poem, and we are left to consider what, exactly, does the word replace? And why? Factual information from the Utah Historical Marker is provided by italicized lines which are followed by a more intimate narrative, all punctuated by bullets. It is a desolate, but not deserted, physical landscape: “Broken- [bullet] glass everywhere. / Based on the beer cans, this/ spot is still being used/ …by transients.” This poem about a unique and one-time thriving community is a stark indictment of the kind of physical and emotional wasteland such places have become.
For the next section of the book, it is useful to know Greek mythology and drama. If the reader is not conversant in that literary tradition, the poems still “work,” but they open up into far more complex narratives with that information to draw from. Again, though, Minicucci provides us with duality: in the poem “Agamemnon Farms in Homer, IL,” the juxtaposition between a physical, known place and the displaced-ness created by introducing the character of Agamemnon at the end of the poem creates a type of synthesis, one that forms a new understanding. There is a functioning farm, but there is also a sense of fatalism, almost defeat: “Agamemnon stretches out his arm and points to each part of the combine. / That night, to no one, he claims to own the sky. // In the morning, he pulls what’s left from the ground….”
“That I carried the Aeneid in my pocket for a semester” is, perhaps, my favorite poem in the book. Maybe it’s the use of the two epigraphs, one from the Aeneid, and one from contemporary poet Rosanna Warren. Couple those markers with the subject matter, add the voice of the poet-speaker, and I’m hooked immediately. Carrying a text with you for months on end can either be a reproach or a talisman: for the poet-speaker in this poem, it might be both. This poem is laden with beautiful images and phrases: “equality is a fool’s dream” and “this river/ that laughs at time’s passage, laughs at you/ thinking there is some downed branch/ to keep you afloat. / Why not sink below?” The dualities abound, such as those created by the collision of ancient story and colloquial diction, as in “Intention and side effects, Helios’s cattle--/ tasty tonight but watch out for the indigestion…/ and perhaps this is partially my fault.” Later in the poem, we get the rhetorical question, “Because what’s a masterpiece without hordes of dead, / human or inhuman?” There is, after all, both in life and in poetry, an element of necessary sacrifice.
In the section titled Confessions, there are poems that focus more on family and relationship, whether those relationships are instructive (for example, the three poems about woodworking and the poet-speaker’s grandfather) or affective in other ways. One line that calls out to the reader is in the small poem, “On Leaving,” when the speaker states that, upon the event of his mother leaving, “it’s the end of things/ we remember, the way porcelain and clay crack/ without protection.” The stark vulnerability of that single image is startling and emotionally fraught. The next poem, “On Conversations,” begins with, “There was a moment I realized prayer/ is just a conversation with who you’d rather be,” and I find myself nodding in agreement; there is a clarity and wisdom in that moment of introspection. This is beautiful poem, filled with quiet images of faith and childhood.
“On James Longenbach” is a carefully crafted example of how a seemingly accidental pairing of events can result in individual meaning. The poet-speaker muses about the death of a fawn in the grass, moves to recollections of statements made by Heraclitus on Pythagoras, and shifts back to calling animal control about the injured and dying animal: “I asked how to save this small thing. I was told/ nothing could be done. Nothing.” The fawn, while existing in the real world, is also metaphorical. How can we, poets and readers alike, hope to save anything –or anyone-- at all? “Eventually, even the sun shrugs its way out of view.”
In the penultimate section of Dual, titled Nouns [That Should Not Be] in the Dual, the reader is invited back in, again and again, to plumb both meanings and mysteries. The forms and the subject matter are complex, and Minicucci employs mainly experimental spacing on the page to further amplify the words he chooses or “should not” choose. Each poem has a title in Greek, but also translated. The first poem, translated as “[man],” hurts. There’s no other way to explain it: there are two columns, separated by ampersands that create a hard caesura. No capital letters, no other punctuation. Again, this poem can, and should, be read both down each column and across the divide. The first column is made up of one phrase, “the world kills kind boys,” and the second column answers back, “we bury the bodies inside men.” The intensity builds as we read the phrases over and over again, across and down the page. This poem is an indictment of the abject cruelty that underscores so much of human history, both objectively and subjectively. It is powerful and heartbreaking, a critical duality. The other poems in this section follow suit; taken as a whole, these poems insist that we pause to think deeply about history, the human community, and what and who we, as a collective voice, have chosen to prize, and what and who we’ve chosen to discard.
The final section of the book is titled Nouns [That Cannot Be] in the Dual. This poem reads almost like fragments, where the word or words become the things, the limited and limitless, the earth-bound and the sacred. Minicucci chooses to craft the poem as a duality, even when choosing to construct a poem out of words that seem to have no pairing. There are the words in Greek, followed by the translation—and sometimes, each Greek word has more than one translation. We have to go back through, and slowly ponder each page, image after image; some are lovely, others disturbing, but all of them together create a whole piece of rich complexity. This poem is both a visual creation as well as one that can be read, contemplatively, aloud. It becomes an almost prayerful/spiritual experience: “each feather a [leaf] or perhaps [leaf] or perhaps [leaf]” (the different words in Greek are placed between each differentiation). How many ways can we consider a thing, to really focus on its essence? This final poem guides us to that meditative place.
Matt Minicucci’s poetry is beautiful. He carries us with him, gently, into specific settings, thoughts, and ideas, helping us to see what he sees, while allowing us the grace and space to form our own perceptions as well. As a collection, Dual leaves us in awe and wonder.
A poet-teacher both by vocation and by trade, Carlene M. Gadapee’s poetry and critical reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in many publications, including English Journal, Waterwheel Review, Gyroscope Review, Smoky Quartz, Think, Allium, Vox Populi, and MicroLit Almanac. Carlene also received a “Best of the Net” nomination in 2023. Her chapbook, What to Keep, will be released by Finishing Line Press in early 2025. Carlene lives and works in northern New Hampshire.