Driven into the Shade by Brandon Cesmat
Poetic Matrix Press, 2003
http://www.poeticmatrix.com
93 pages. $12.00
ISBN: 0-9714003-3-4
Reviewed by Mark Steinbeck
On The Bus 2005
Driven into the Shade is not “dark" it’s chiaroscuro. At a poetry festival headlining the blissful Billy Collins, Brandon
Cesmat read “Where Was Fidel When I Needed Him?”—a poem about electrifying a father’s genitals and admiring
Castro—to a San Diego crowd of about 400 K-12 students and their parents. That Cesmat’s protest poem received
some of the loudest applause of the day says as much about the complexities of American families as it does about
Driven into the Shade’s aesthetic for articulating the liabilities of the light and attributes of the dark.
The ‘Fidel’ poem could serve as an emblem for Driven into the Shade, which unapologetically insists that the
domestic and the political, the private and the public, the profane and divine are intimately connected. Occasionally in
contemporary poetry; these connections get severed and the dichotomies become either piles of I’m-okay/you’re-okay
mush or distant planets of smug transgression and literary isolation. Using fine distinctions, Cesmat travels the
antipodes with a rebellious clarity that seems to say the contemporary stakes—especially in his California—are too
high to be left to anything less then the narrative poem imbued with the diaphanous imagery of metaphor punctuated
by music.
‘When Cesmat writes in “Gracias, Sabás,” “Today I look at flour tortifias as topographical maps / brown and black hills
in the white desert / where masa harina rose into the palms that made them,” he moves from the mundane to the
humane to the divine quickly and clearly, as if he were revealing a new trinity; a new communion for America's sin of
historical amnesia.
Perhaps more interesting than Cesmat’s milieu of the United States as a part of Latin America is his less—than-
innocent view of family. Poems such as “Shadow Around the Ring” portray children unromantically, describing a love
of dedication and gumption that is probably more honest than many families would like to admit. Cesmat celebrates
such love in “Ice Drum’ where a father and son throw ice and rocks onto a frozen pond they swam in the summer
before:
Surfaces change and we say nothing as my stones ping and crack
and his ice hums and sizzles
on this morning when only my first born and I hear this music
back through the seasons
and down to the bottom.
The book seems to track a voice from boyhood to fatherhood, idealizing neither one, thus giving the collection a
relentlessly honest arc. Imagine Blake born in L.A.’s rumbling sprawl instead of London: Songs of Experience sung
in a bluesy voice.
Families, rather than being the vessel of survival, become the crisis to be survived. In the title poem, the narrator tries
to keep his mother and father from divorcing, and in doing so destroys himself.l If that narrator is also the father of the
haunting poem “Sons,” then family becomes something of a Promethean Fire. Perhaps most frightening is the
contemporary sonnet “Between Covers”:
On this planet all lines intersect if we follow
them far enough. Our poor mother bets all on her children,
believing us more faithful than lovers though we abandon
her a day at a time. She is an egg we split and leave hollow.
Rather than leaving the reader hollow, Driven into the Shade fills one up, as if feeling hollow is a failure to
acknowledge that the dark is full with its own atmosphere.
Reviewed by Mark Steinbeck