“The Trouble with Light” Finds Humanity and Triumph in Trial

“The Trouble with Light” Finds Humanity and Triumph in Trial https://ift.tt/eWBuZP5

Jeremy Michael Clark’s debut poetry collection The Trouble with Light reads like a novel that couples autobiography with mythical realism. Clark introduces readers to setting and tone in the first poem, “Memory, Flooding Back,” in which “The water / seeped through a window…” and the speaker, “like a child,” thinks “the house has started to cry.” 

Throughout the poems, the speaker remains the same, aging chronologically and delving into his past with curiosity and courage. This creates an intimate experience for the reader, who is pulled deep inside an upbringing where neglect, violence, substance abuse, racism and family dysfunction coalesce. Yet, remarkably, this isn’t an elegiac collection because of the story arc.

The inciting incident occurs in “I Learned My Name Was Not My Name,” when the speaker’s stepfather “stood over me & said, / Why stick up for her? She hasn’t even told you / who your daddy really is. I was seven.” This heart-wrenching moment, blurted out during a domestic dispute, silences the speaker more than “A gag of knuckles.” The speaker begins to question his self-worth and place in the world. “When I learned my name was / not my name, I became nobody’s ghost. I grew inside / out.” 

As the speaker matures, he struggles with belonging and faces a perpetual conflict between light and dark. The epistolary poem “Dear Darkness” grapples with this beautifully, setting the stage for the speaker’s journey towards the light that seems appears to lie beyond his reach:

I love most

about sunset
how it suggests

distance, a further
place where the

world curves
beyond what I see.

From there, the speaker seeks to discover where he came from in “Those That Flew:”

Before the house I believe is my father's
       I stand, a rust-flecked fence

between me & the answer. A latch
   I can't lift. Rain comes & I say,

Is this how it's supposed to be?
       Soaked, unable to shield myself

from what puddles at my feet.

The speaker almost becomes a tragic hero mingling mythology with his own quest to confirm his parentage in “One Fire Quenched With Another” where he states, “What the boy wanted: / to finally know his father’s face. / Evidence, at last, of his origin.” Like Phaethon, who desires to prove his worth to his absentee father and the rest of the world by driving the sun chariot across the sky, the speaker totters on the threshold of boyhood and manhood, losing “control of the reigns” and finding himself still “fatherless, godless, no less abandoned than he’d been.” However, after becoming sober and “Doing the Work,” a strength emerges from all the obstacles the speaker has faced and overcome. “The trouble with light / is its insistence: / the curtain’s failure to block it out / may be a flaw, but not one / it can help.”

The poems are set in the South, and Clark’s speaker does not shy away from expressing the lived experience of racism. In “Now You See It,” the speaker reflects, “I turned twenty-six / the way a man turns onto a street / where he once lived, his casual stroll / raising suspicion.” The stakes are heightened in “The South Got Something To Say,” where the consequences of growing up in a Black body are laid out:

Not an ounce of your body's blood
is yours alone, yet you dare

carry it across state lines,
knowing what happens to anyone caught

with that kind of contraband.

It’s hard to describe the many strengths of this collection, which read like a poet at the top of his game instead of a debut collection. The poems have been stripped of excess, and Clark’s use of form to convey meaning is masterful. For example, the “Unauthorized Autobiography” is a cento poem, composed of lines from other artists, patching together a broken speaker and erasing the speaker completely beneath the words of others. 

These poems are filled with music and poignant line breaks, and they read like a coming of age story for a Black American speaker who has overcome demons and found a new way of being in the world. The Trouble with Light is haunting and devastating, but it progresses through the stages of transformation one would expect from a hero, and through hard work and hope it ends with the triumphant embrace of the speaker’s own human limits.

POETRY
The Trouble with Light
By Jeremy Michael Clark
University of Arkansas Press
Published April 29, 2024