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Women of the Disturbed Earth

By John Nizalowski

Found in: | Inside | Books |

In his book Hermann Hesse, the German critic Franz Baumer notes that with The Journey to the East, Hesse celebrates a state of existence both "heroic and magical." The same could be said for New Mexico poet John Macker and his newest book, Woman of the Disturbed Earth.

In this, his fourth collection, Macker honors the souls, both famous and intimate, who have helped shape his wondrously textured world, including his wife, Annie, avant-garde jazz maestro Ornette Coleman, noir western film director Sam Peckinpah, and the big rattler that dwells beneath the junipers in Macker's back acreage.

All characters in Woman of the Disturbed Earth have achieved the "heroic and magical," and as with all magic, the results range from the sublime to the violently destructive. For instance, in "Jornada del Muerto," Macker depicts the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb, during which J. Robert Oppenheimer "upends/his pipe & sees the cinders of our hearts/broken into small shadows."

Throughout the book, the Southwestern landscape looms over Macker's heroes and anti-heroes, asserting its own powerful sorcery, weaving a surreal presence both biting and savory.

Macker begins Woman of the Disturbed Earth with "Billy's Confession," a poem about a surprisingly tender and self-reflective Billy the Kid. The poem begins, "As a kid I stole groceries for/my poor ma" and ends, "For the first time/on the day she was buried/I called her Catherine." In between, Billy dismisses his fame: "I watched all of my shadows/float away, become a living batch/of grown men that someday/will reveal/the toxicity of my breed."

With the next poem, "Peckinpah's Typewriter," Macker establishes the link between the warriors of the old Southwest - Billy the Kid, Cochise, Victorio, and others - with the shamanic energies of modern jazz musicians, poets, and film directors. The poet unearths a battered typewriter from a dry arroyo and claims it once belonged to the director of The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs: "I've ascribed all sorts of/snakebit tequila mysticism to it . . ./deformed reddish with rust,/as if dropped/from purgatory but/still sizzling with stories of/outcast border burn-/outs."

As the book evolves, the poets who have inspired Macker's own work receive their due, including Ted Berrigan, John Knoll, Robert Creeley, and Ed Dorn. In "Borges Holiday," Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinean magic realist, arrives in western Colorado as a ghost, translates Kafka on Christmas Eve, and then hallucinates the poet "sitting here/thinking about the Tao of these/colors, the insatiable juncos & the gnawing/dryness of winter." Then, Borges, or the poet, or perhaps both in mystic unison write a Christmas letter to the Czech master of the absurd: "Dear Franz Kafka: for Christmas/I want a black dog & 100 dollars, some/red lipstick for my Aunt Kim, my mom/to have another baby and also a dog/P.S. I've been real good this year."

However, jazz musicians like Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, and Chick Corea inspire the book's best pieces, and often Macker's jazz poems blend the southwestern desert landscape with the brilliant architecture these genius composers erected on the plains of eternity. Perhaps the finest example of this fusion occurs in "Desert Mingus" - "the anonymous snakeskin cloud/dangling just above the flameless ground/in the middle of nowhere/fills with an elusive jazz & names/the distant Martian hills out our rented/car window: Black Saints/Sinner Ladies."

In "Today I Saw an Apparition of Ed Dorn," Macker describes the phantom Dorn reading a copy of Laughing Horse at "the crossing of Plaza Fatima and Delgado streets." The allusion to the great literary magazine of Taos from the 1920s and 1930s is utterly appropriate, for like the classic modernist poets and writers who appeared in Laughing Horse - Spud Johnson, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Witter Bynner, Frank Waters, and more - Macker roots his work in the Southwestern landscape, whether his subject is jazz, politics, or poetry. The powerful landscapes of the New Mexican llano and the Colorado mountains illuminate Macker's poems, making them to shine like a piece of mica shot quartzite nestled in sunlight.

It is fitting, therefore, that the book's final poem is a tribute to autumn, the Southwest's apex season. For, in the end, the best poetry returns to themes from the land, the land that shapes our rhythms and our spirits: "Autumn as much a notion as it is/warm day, hand drawn/red crayon moon/above the canyon/in slows motion, a crisp/yellow leaf afloat in its singularity/flows down a shadowed stream/into the Roaring Fork/is peace."

John Nizalowski is the author of Hooking the Sun and teaches writing and mythology at Mesa State College in Grand Junction, Colo.