This is the review I wrote of Santee Frazier's
Dark Thirty for an upcoming issue of
Southwestern American Literature.
Dark Thirty by Santee Frazier. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2009. 96 pp. $15.95 paperback.
The title of Santee Frazier’s debut collection of poetry,
Dark Thirty, refers to the time of day after the sun has gone down, when fading rays illuminate part of a quickening dark landscape. Shining the light on the marginalized citizens of Dry Creek, a community located within Cherokee County, Oklahoma, Santee Frazier has crafted an astonishing collection of poems that bring the varied voices and intimate narratives of a community afflicted by crime, violence, substance abuse, and poverty into stark relief.
Dark Thirty is organized into six sections; the book’s first section, “Dry Creek” introduces the mood, voice, and central themes that recur throughout the collection. In a poem entitled “Chauncey,” narrated by a plainspoken character of the same name, Chauncey gives the reader glimpses into a private life while effortlessly gossiping about the locals in his native vernacular:
Dang near had tah pluck my yard bird
other day, we had done ate all are fatback
Meely over tah tha Teller’s Liquor got caught
round back drankin listo, huffin on some gold. (8)
Frazier compresses and layers complex subjects into short couplet stanzas that reveal an intricate portrait of an individual and the people in his community. Elsewhere, poetic personas like “Joe Bunch” reflect upon a life of hard living and a body regulated by “nitro pills.” Another character, “Nick Cheater,” details overhauling the transmission on his Trans Am, while brokering a deal to buy a neighbor’s Buick that includes one of Nick’s dogs in the bargain.
The reader is also introduced in this first section to the dominant voice that narrates poems throughout the collection. In “Mama’s Work,” the poetic speaker recalls a mother who turned tricks to feed the family, “her work/ in the quiet corners of barns on the hay.” (7) The unsheltered childhood of the same speaker is explored later in “Bluetop,” a poem where the underage child, (his “legs too short to work/the brakes,”) drives his Mama and her Buick home on gas fumes. (13) Fraught with the uncertainty of running out of fuel on gravel roads deep within the countryside, Frazier ends his poem on a note that hovers on the edge of danger and quiet beauty. Numerous poems that reflect upon family and domestic life also make up the third section of the book.
The second and fourth sections of
Dark Thirty, “Baptism of the Knife” and “Skillet Face” follow the life story of Mangled Creekbed, an outsider figure whose experience is traced throughout the collection from his stint in a circus as a knife-thrower to his incarceration for cutting a man in a bar fight to his confinement to a wheelchair, after suffering from a stroke. The most tender poems in this sequence are the pieces that touch upon Mangled’s companionship with Lulu, the circus’ Target Girl, who writes letters for the illiterate Mangled, reads him stories, and sings Baptist hymns with him in church.
Dark Thirty is rounded out by poems set in inner-city environments that make up the book’s remaining two sections, “Jack Move” and “Aerosol.” The poems in these later sections of the collection focus on first-person narratives and shift from a native vernacular to a more urban sensibility. A narrator remembers discharging a gun for the first time in “Firing a .38 at Age Sixteen,” while the image of a murdered teenager found dead in a dumpster appears in “Crosstown.” “10th Street Anthem” sketches the cityscape of Oklahoma City, “boys sprinting in the streetlight”; a kid with “a blade in his tube sock”; asphalt smelling of “hot rocks and tar”; a “flattened mutt in the gutter.” (69)
The final section of
Dark Thirty concerns itself with the theme of recognition. In “Solitude,” the poet chronicles aspects of an unnamed singer’s life (Billie Holiday) that resonate with the sensual and “ruined” women who appear throughout
Dark Thirty. A sense of exile and poverty are awakened in the speaker of “Eating Against a Wall,” when the poet is able to identify with the experience of the refugee-like figures who improvise a simple meal on the street –– eating noodles slurped from a Cool Whip Bowl, while squatting on an unrolled bamboo mat. This impression connects easily to the images of “One Room Apartment,” a poem that occurs much earlier in Dark Thirty, in which a young narrator scavenges a meal from “A-1 and stale saltines…pickle juice from the jar.” (33) The closing poem of
Dark Thirty, “An Aerosoled Representation of the Maya and Moche” is the longest piece within the collection and reflects most directly upon the theme of recognition through the eyes of a poetic narrator who is kept for years from knowing the existence of his infant daughter. Upon their reunion, he recognizes “a face half my own.” (82)
Frazier’s debut collection displays affinities with a documentary poetic tradition that includes projects like Kwame Dawe’s
Wisteria, a poem collection based on oral histories collected from a community of black female elders in Sumter, South Carolina. Connections also seem evident with Natasha Trethewey’s poetics, which are largely concerned with restoring subaltern voices to mainstream historical narratives. For Frazier, who is a member of the Cherokee Nation, no direct mention is made of his characters’ Native identity, nor is the gesture necessary, as the language, spirit, and tenacity of the protagonists who inhabit
Dark Thirty shine through.
