“there is moon enough still // to walk home by:” A review of John Hoppenthaler’s “Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area” https://ift.tt/F6ydM2q
In John Hoppenthaler’s Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area, finding beauty amid the ruins left by grief, loss, and regret is central to Hoppenthaler’s latest contemplative, meditative poetic offerings. Familial love and individual perseverance, as well as deep attention to the intense emotions that shape one’s perceptions, ground each poem. Haunting and daring, these carefully crafted verses are illuminations and chants meant to carry one through an increasingly frightening world.
“I’d forgotten how music can shift / a body into depression like this, how / memory clings like cigarette smoke,” laments the speaker in John Hoppenthaler’s poem “Bourbon, Cigarettes, Van Morrison.” The poem is just one of the many exceptional poems housed in Hoppenthaler’s latest collection. Like other poems in the collection, “Bourbon, Cigarettes, Van Morrison” is a deep, haunting exploration of loss and grief’s many nuances and the human heart’s emotional complexities. The fourth stanza is a remarkable one:
Morrison’s given way to only
that percussion, whiskey’s
flame in my belly. My mother
no longer speaks, but she grins
horribly at the nursing home.
The internal turn shocks and jars readers so that they find themselves leaving the speaker’s contemplation about cold November’s segue into winter and music’s influence on the mood to the speaker’s reckoning with a mother’s physical and mental decline. As much as the turn is simple, it is complex, and this forms a psychological duality that rivets readers even more when they reach the poem’s final lines:
flicks spit those days when she
fails to recognize me. The wasps
have given up. Eventually, so does the rain.
The ending is succinct, abrupt, and blunt, and the enjambment forms the speaker’s potent resolve and determination.
“OCD” is another poem in which Hoppenthaler’s line mastery is exquisite. It opens with the compelling couplet “At least he’s not undergoing an exorcism, / not being made to repent a litany of sins,” a reference to historical treatments for disorders like OCD. The poem then segues into more couplets, where readers learn that “Danny // picks his own scabs to make them bleed” and that “At least we know he can’t help it.” The couplets, however, serve a larger thematic purpose. When examined closely and read slowly, their internal structures mimic the behavioral tics such as picking and other repetitive motions on which Danny relies. This is most noticeable as the poem veers towards its conclusion:
on him now. He’s playing his very favorite
video game, one where he gets to kill all
the zombies. The game’s both escape and
obsession. He has a ritual to keep it pure.
Last night he couldn’t stop asking Christy
if she loved him. He needed to make sure
(tap) make sure (tap) make sure (tap).
The internal, staccato shifts formed by the effective enjambment echo the act of tapping and the repetition of “make sure” in the final line, ultimately clinching the poem’s emotion.
“Hummingbirds & Eagles” is another poem in which Hoppenthaler proves himself to be the master of effective, enjambed couplets. While many other poems in Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area contain emotional darkness and edginess, “Hummingbirds & Eagles” develops softly, even romantically, thanks to its reliance on natural imagery. The speaker describes hummingbirds as “cantankerous creatures” and asserts that, as humans, “Sometimes / we disappear—or so it seems—into the neuroses / of hummingbirds.” Hummingbird behavior becomes a metaphor for human behavior: “We want the nectar, that’s all / and, when it’s gone, we apologize, my love, and fall.” Moreover, the poem offers readers an anecdote about how even the simplest acts can become acts of devotion or even redemption:
I hold the funnel in place while you pour sugar- water, blood-red, into the feeder, steady
me as I stretch from the footstool to hang it from a small hook under the eave.
I step down into waiting arms; you sink your talons nearly to the bone, tell me that you’ll never leave.
Thus, the poem ultimately serves as a commentary on the intricacies and quirks of human behavior in relationships.
Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area also relies on thematic repetition to simulate life’s undulations. “Jesus. Frankenstein. Danny’s Monsters.” returns to the themes in “OCD.” The speaker states, “I think sometimes how my stepson, // in less enlightened times, would have / been exorcised. It’s that simple.” The speaker also recognizes that because the stepson “might not have a prayer still, as far as enlightenment goes” and confesses that they “sympathize with Victor,” a reference to Frankenstein. This allusion collides with multiple religious references, including the synoptic Gospels and exorcism:
The synoptic Gospels credit
Jesus for the exorcism
of a demonically possessed,
moonstruck boy, foaming at the mouth
and unwilling to speak. How much
longer must I be among you?
Jesus asked the crowd. A faithless
generation, he christened them.
In these lines, a dark humor emerges, thanks to the inclusion of Jesus’s question, which repeats in a later stanza, and the speaker describes Jesus’s tone “As if he had / something better to do than heal.” However, the humor lasts only briefly, and as the poem concludes, it does so with a simple, resounding meditation: “I believe; help my unbelief.” The final line leaves readers fully immersed in the speaker’s emotional, even spiritual, conflict.
Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area is an emotionally riveting collection, and these poetic meditations weave the human world with the natural one. It examines the psychological and spiritual spaces so many do not dare to explore. In a dark world of socio-political upheaval, these poems offer readers a path where “there is moon enough still // to walk home by.”
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