reviews

The Fractured World by Scott Owens (Main
Street Rag, 2008, The Main Street Rag)
Review by Tim Peeler

The Fractured World by Scott Owens is a
three section book of mostly narrative
poems that address the issue of child abuse
and its long term effects on the male
psyche. Owens knows firsthand about this
problem. I have heard him begin a reading
several times by informing the audience that
as children he and his brother suffered
every possible form of abuse. Even without
this knowledge, the reader will have no
trouble determining the authenticity of the
characters and their experiences.

As Carter Monroe has noted many times,
with the advent of Internet communication,
everybody and his brother has come out of
the closet as a poet. As a result, unlike in
the past, what passes for poetry, and who
in the hell is to say what does, comes at us
in waves. As a longtime reader of and
participant in the American small press, I
have developed a quick criteria for
analyzing what washes up on the screen.
For poetry to interest me, it must first show
some sense of craft. Beyond that, it must
do one of two things. The poetry must
either make me feel something or aspire in
an amusing sense to the sublime. In The
Fractured World, Owens meets all these
criteria. He is a careful writer whose highly
accessible poetry rarely reads like broken
up prose.

Poetry should disturb us; it should create
an uneasy feeling in our stomachs. In
“Fates Worse Than Death,” the first poem in
section one, The Fractured World, Owens
invites the reader to empathize not just with
the abused, but also with the abuser. In
their brokenness, how do either of them go
on? Will they become the solitary
characters that populate poems like
“Sunday Afternoon, Atlanta Fulton County
Stadium,” or will they emerge in high profile
like the multiple-personality figure of Billy
Milligan in the exceptionally well-conceived
“Splinters”? Not all is somber in this section
of the book, and taken out of context, one
might read “Meetings in Poultry” as a corny
attempt at humor. Even this poem,
however, contains violent imagery, and the
title, with poultry so closely resembling
poetry, in some way implies that savagery
often seen in the literary world.

The second section of The Fractured World
is “Suite Norman,” an examination of
brokenness in one cobbled together
persona. Norman is the poet, his brother,
his father, his stepfathers, and many of the
males that populated his childhood. These
poems are the core of the book, and there
are so many fine ones. Here are a few
snippets that will give the reader a sense of
their power:

from “Norman Everyday”

Norman alone in his car,
in front of his own house,
watching through a lit window…
racing the train to the crossing,
racing to the interstate,
racing anything that moves,
driving the tank dry,
pounding the dash,
smashing the mirror,
hurling rocks against the darkness,
screaming his own name.”

from “Norman in the Window, His Eyes Like
Shattered Glass”

The welt on her face is already taking
the shape of a hand in a window.
Norman is in he window. He can tell by the
pain
in his hand that he is not dreaming.
Even through these broken panes
he can see the last look back.

Owens concludes the book with a section
called “Smoke Dissolving in Wind” in which
he establishes for his characters some
sense of hope, even redemption. Poems
like “On the Days I am not My Father” and
“Love and the Daughter” relate to his own
uneasy fatherhood. In “Obsession,” a poem
that deals with friends who gleefully tempt
death, he reveals a survivor’s philosophy:

…why not give it another try,
why not rise to another morning
fueled by certainties,
the still warm body,
the throat still clean,
the pulse still beating against you,
the shadows mushrooming behind you.

The finale of the book is a gem of a poem
called “So Norman Died, Of Course.” It
ends with this incredible metaphoric
redemptive glimpse:

And his hand,
his hard right hand,
which never learned to hold
anything gently turned into
a leaf that held the wind,
rain, sunlight upon it,
then let everything go.