On the heels of his recent collections, How Hot it Be In Hell, Boy, Kant You Read, and Eating ‘Round the Toilet Stool, Aubrey E. Drummond’s latest collection continues the ongoing project of his exploration of memories, love, race, and time. Blackbird contains some of Drummond’s finest and most ambitious poems yet, poems drafted as early as the mid-late 1970s. Though, in this collection, Drummond has moved the dates of poems to the backmatter of the book (previous collections included copyright dates with each poem), these notes and the very fabric of the poems themselves make the reader ever-aware of the poet’s preoccupation with memory and moment. “The memory is in the poem,” Drummond writes in his notes, “Whether true or false. The memory’s there.”
As in previous collections, Drummond impresses the reader most as masterful writer of the short lyric. Poems like “Heart Love/Heart Wound,” “Blue,” and “Hateful (Thought)” demonstrate his gift for compression, for tightly constructed lines and succinctness of language that allow singular images or turns of phrase to rattle the reader. In the space of a sharp couplet or quatrain or a string of twelve short, clipped lines, Drummond’s shorter lyrical verses rival those of any luminaries of the form.
The longer poems, though perhaps more variable in impact than the short lyrics, are nevertheless powerfully meditative reflections on experience and anecdote. In poems like “Take A Break,” Drummond builds out and unfolds from rhetorical questions, using inquiry as a means of deep reflection and analysis of the self's lived world. Taking up subjects of intimate love and the evils of a racist society, Drummond uses the longer poems to both express and critique, never allowing the reader to lose sight of the individual. Whether writing a speaker’s experience from the first-person perspective or writing about stakeholders in changing a broken world (children in “Destruction Game,” for instance), Drummond’s work cares deeply about seeing people—their lives, their struggles, their celebrations, their pains.
Drummond’s Blackbird is very much a worthwhile read, whether this is your first introduction to his work or you are among those who have followed his poetry to date. The energy with which these recent books have emerged creates a cohesion between the projects. With each new collection, the reader feels that something much larger is unfolding as a uniquely talented poet continues to show us more from his extensive back catalogue of work and his deep pool of memory.
