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Journal of Homosexuality
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Three Poetry Books

Michael Ferguson
Published online: 05 May 2009.

To cite this article: Michael Ferguson (2009) Three Poetry Books, Journal of Homosexuality, 56:4,
532-536, DOI: 10.1080/00918360902835171

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 Journal of Homosexuality, 56:532–536, 2009
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0091-8369 print/1540-3602 online
DOI: 10.1080/00918360902835171

Book Review
1540-3602
0091-8369
WJHM
Journal of Homosexuality,
Homosexuality Vol. 56, No. 4, March 2009: pp. 1–8

Three Poetry Books

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The Second Person. C. Dale Young. New York: Four Way Books, 2007.
Book Review

Mood Swings. Uriah Bell. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2008.

The Beautiful Tendons: Uncollected Queer Poems 1969–2007.

Jeffery Beam. Brooklyn, NY: White Crane Books, 2008.
Poetry is the art of using words forcefully, delicately, and economically to
communicate from the heart to the heart. There are many devices and
techniques for doing this. Poetry creates subtleties and shades of meaning
through word choices, the flow of a phrase, and juxtapositions. But poetry
is about more than words. Poetry shares much in common with music.
The nonverbal subtexts within poetry are as important as the choices of
words: rhythm, structure, rhyme, melody, intonation, juxtaposition, alliter-
ation, dissonance, repetition, imagery, symbolism, abstraction, and silence
all play a role in communication through poetry. To fully grasp a poem’s
message one must be sensitive to the impact of these subtle nonverbal
inputs. Poetry is not for everybody. Reactions to poetry are highly subjec-
tive. A reader’s reaction to a poem can be likened to a chemistry experi-
ment. One brings to the poem who one is with all of one’s life experience,
and mixes that subjectivity with what is offered in the poem. The result is
a response, a reaction. Can one response claim more validity than
another? As a response, no, but one can analyze the respondent and the
response, just as one can analyze what happened in a test tube when
chemicals react. The response tells as much about the respondent as it
does about the poem that engendered the response. One has to keep this
in mind when reading a review of poetry. A reviewer of poetry strives to
reach beyond his own subjective response to provide an estimate of the
poem’s likely appeal to other readers. This involves evaluating the crafts-
manship, the psychological meaning, as well as the aesthetic appeal of the
poem. Reviewing poetry is a more complex challenge than reviewing a
book of prose. Prose does not depend as much on this rich nonverbal
vocabulary. The ultimate object of a review is not to give a definitive

532
 Book Review 533

grade to a book or a poem, but to draw attention to qualities that will help
the reader of the review decide whether he or she might like to go on and
read the book.
Here I look at three recent books of poetry that incorporate same-sex
relationships as part of their thematic material. I would not say that each of
these books is preoccupied to the same degree with same-sex issues, but
same-sex issues are evident in all three volumes. The poems by C. Dale
Young in The Second Person are beautifully crafted and show a high level of
experience and skill in using words. The poems are short, most of them fit
on one page, and I like that. I think poetry should be succinct and econom-
ical: getting the maximum out of each word and eliminating the extraneous.
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It is an aesthetic that Young seems to understand. There is a leanness in his

poetry, but it is not as spare as Jeffery Beam’s. Beam sometimes carries
economy to the point where the poem becomes an abstraction. Young
remains at least translucent. In some of the poems he refers to his being a
painter. I’ve never seen any of his paintings, but I would surmise from read-
ing his poems that his paint palette must be subdued: browns, grays, off
whites, dark greens, neutrals, monochromes. The cover picture of the vol-
ume is a painting of Saint Sebastian by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot in
shades of brown; it is a very apt choice. Young is not Yellow Submarine. He
presents brooding, introspective poems: A lot of ocean beach landscapes,
fog, San Francisco streets. One very interesting aspect of this volume is the
many references to his work as a physician, apparently at the University of
California at San Francisco, judging from the neighborhoods and streets to
which he refers. They yield a rare window into the soul of a physician and
his personal reaction to the plight of his patients and their struggles with ill-
ness and death. It is something not often seen in poetry—or anywhere.
“Prognosis” is a touching example.
The third section of the book is a long poem entitled “Triptych at the
Edge of Sight.” It is presented as a single poem but is divided into 27 short
sections each of nine lines, which in turn are broken into three groups of
three. It is a somber rumination that takes place along San Francisco’s
Ocean Beach. There is a same-sex relationship with which he seems to be
struggling. There is pain; there is reflection. Images from the beach and the
relationship interweave through this long peregrination. Remote associa-
tions sometimes briefly intrude. But he returns to the subject, yet does not
reach a conclusion. His skill with imagery and word choice is quite effec-
tive. “Beside the Unnamed Lake” is a beautiful lullaby where the comforting
physician and the lover seem to merge. “Maelstrom” is an interesting reflec-
tive on a past sexual encounter. There is a lot of sadness, longing, and som-
ber reflection in this poetry.
Temperamentally, I feel a marked affinity for Young among the three poets
presented here because of his cultural interests, such as painting and music, and
also the relative accessibility of most of his poems, but I regard Jeffery Beam as
 534 Book Review

the premier craftsman among the three of them and I find myself returning to
his most often even though to me many of his poems are spare and obscure.
Uriah Bell is a much younger man and a much different kind of poet.
His poems are less searching and more raw. He is Jimi Hendrix to Young’s
Brahms. He is preoccupied with himself. He is struggling with defining who
he is, instead of just being who he is. Many of his poems are in the second
person, addressing his partners with the turmoil of their personal relation-
ship. These poems tend to reflect personal narcissistic injury rather than
understanding and insight into the partner and the relationship. I think
Bell’s better poems are those written in the first or the third person, when
he is speaking his own heart with his own voice, as opposed to voicing his
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frustrations with someone he is involved with. “The Detached” might be an

exception. Bell is not the craftsman that either Young or Beam is; his poetry
is uneven and sometimes undisciplined. His youthfulness is evident, as are
his inexperience, his narcissism, and his vulnerability—but also evident is
his considerable talent. I think he is a promising poetic voice. All of his rela-
tionships are same-sex. Outside of the acknowledgments there is barely a
mention of a woman in the entire book. He is much more willing to go into
sexual details than Young. Some of his poems have an erotic feel such as
“Lock the Door—A Barber’s Tale,” but generally, these poems are not a cel-
ebration of eroticism, in contrast to Jeffery Beam, who will be taken up
shortly. There is actually a lot of pain, frustration, longing, and conflict in
his relationships. He is a young man who has not yet mastered his personal
life or himself. My favorite poems in Bell’s collection are “The Detached,”
“Bottoms Up,” “Drowning,” “Falling Apart,” “Love and Pain,” “Night,”
“Numb,” and “Apartment Five.” The reason I choose these is that they are
the most well crafted, well thought out poems in the book, and the most
revealing of his inner self. These poems seem to go to the core of who Bell
is as a person and explore the major issues in his life. This book will appeal,
I think, mainly to young gay male readers, and particularly if they are
African American.
Jeffery Beam’s volume, The Beautiful Tendons: Uncollected Queer
Poems 1969–2007, is an assemblage that spans nearly 40 years. It displays a
variety of styles that I found to represent an active, searching, creative mind
that is evolving and ever reinventing his craft. In an opening introduction,
“The Visionary Company of Love,” he provides some autobiographical
background that offers a context, and a philosophical approach to his work
as a poet: growing up ”Queer” in the conservative religious environment of
North Carolina. I will not take up the issues he raises in his introduction, but
I do recommend it as interesting and illuminating background to the poems.
Beam’s poems are the most explicitly sexual and the most self-consciously
erotic in the three volumes under consideration here. Beam enjoys eroticism
and revels in it, unlike Bell, for example, who struggles with it. I can see
influences of Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and
 Book Review 535

especially Asian styles from Japan and China in Beam’s poems. A lot of his
poetry is very minimalistic, too much so for my taste. This extreme condensa-
tion makes the poetry less accessible. There is much more going on in the
poet’s head than is conveyed on the page for the reader. This kind of poetry
calls on the reader to exercise his imagination or to be satisfied with frag-
ments. Sometimes the poems seem almost like private communications that
only someone very close to the writer would understand. References and
continuity become so obscure that one can become lost: “Blue Cancione”
and “The Lost Boy,” among numerous examples. This same enigmatic style
is often seen in poets from East Asian societies, where the offering in the
poem is so skeletal that one is faced with something akin to an artifact from
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a remote society whose significance is completely elusive. I want to see the

writer and his subject a little more clearly. However, there is considerable
range in these poems and many are much more immediate and concrete.
I especially liked the section titled “Von Gloeden.” This section is
approximately 20 pages. Each page displays a photograph of a nude male
(or males) by the German photographer Wilhem von Gloeden (1856–1931).
Beneath each photograph is a short poem inspired by the photograph. The
poems are not exactly commentary on the photographs, rather they seem
to be Beam’s own associations to the photograph. The photographs are
very striking and I like the concept of a poem inspired by a photograph
and presented alongside it. I like a book that is not afraid to show men’s
penises and discuss them frankly. We are much too averse to men’s bodies
in this society.
“Beautiful Tendons,” the poem that lends its title to the volume, is the
longest poem in the book, divided into 13 sections. There is a same-sex
relationship at the crux of it. It has a subtle eroticism throughout that is
occasionally hard edged and explicit. There are images, actions, and emo-
tions pasted together in a collage, but there is no concern with clarity. I
would compare it to a landscape that is shrouded in a fog. One can make
out shapes, shadows, and occasionally something explicit and clear will
emerge, but it is hard to discern exactly what one is looking at. You get an
idea, sometimes acutely expressed, but you can’t really penetrate it in any
depth. You have to be satisfied with the small fragments, often beautifully
phrased, that join together in a flow. Although very different in style, it
recalls Young’s “Tryptych at the Edge of Sight” in its primary concern with a
same-sex relationship. But, in Beam’s case, eroticism is central to the rela-
tionship. In Young, it is reflective, painful longing. A few additional favor-
ites of mine from Beautiful Tendons include “Anemone,” “Song for a
Birthday,” “The Unobtainable,” “A Flower Song,” “Blues for Goodbye,” and
“Instinct.”
I would like to call attention to Beam’s mastery of poetic technique in
his sense of beauty and effect in rhythm and line: the way consonants shape
a phrase and give it a pace and a flow. One sees it throughout the volume,
 536 Book Review

but I will illustrate what I mean with one favorite example. Consider this
excerpt from “Song for a Birthday”

Such melon anguish the sweet shrub makes

Its multi-cupped flowers opening
Little lotuses at the woods edge
A remedy
to slay Winter darkness

In the first line the s, ch, m, and l sounds give the line a smooth flow, a kind
of running start, but then the t, b, and the k sounds in the last half of the
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line act as a brake causing the reader to pause just momentarily, just long
enough to absorb that first line. You have to stop briefly on each one of
those words in order to articulate them: “sweet,” “shrub,” “makes.” The con-
sonants do that, going from a t to an shr, from a b to an m. You have to
change your mouth. That small pause gives just enough time to absorb that
run of images. The word “opening” in the second line is an action word. It
creates a dynamic. Something is happening. This is not going to be a static
image. The poem is going somewhere. “Little lotuses:” the consecutive l
sounds create an accent that again causes a brief pause in the flow, but not
as pronounced as in the first line. But “at the woods edge” flows quickly
and drops off, a diminuendo, that sets up the punch line, or the moral to
follow. “A remedy” is a strong word with a d sound sticking out of it that
occupies its own line and dominates the preceding three lines. This is the
destination of these soft images of flowers and woods and shrubs with
which we began. “Slay” is another very strong word that intensifies ‘remedy.’
He could have just said “A remedy for Winter darkness,” which would have
been softer and made the whole poem rather benign. But introducing the
word “slay” gives an unexpectedly hard edge to this sanguine image of
opening flowers and melon anguish of the sweet shrub with which the
stanza opens. It lends a forcefulness to the poem that one might not expect
from such feminine images of shrubs and flowers and little lotuses at the
woods edge. This is one example of many that could be lifted from these
poems that illustrate Beam’s mastery of the resources of the English lan-
guage to create subtlety in aesthetic quality. This is a mature writer who has
mastered his craft and has considerable breadth in his repertoire. His style is
sometimes overly compressed and disconnected for my taste, but there is
eroticism, there is subtlety, there is imagination, there are unexpected twists
and turns. There is much to be recommended in this high quality volume.

Michael Ferguson
San Francisco
[email protected]