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Sing, Muse, the audacity of Toby Barlow, who has here written a first novel of uncommon force and stark poetry, an epic set to blank verse.
The plot: Anthony, brown and out of work, gets a job at the local pound, where all the fellow dog catchers reek of failure, whiskey, and a dog’s death; he meets and falls for a girl, only the girl is not a girl strictly speaking but the female member of a pack of werewolves. She was recruited by the pack’s leader, Lark, a straight-edge alpha male who keeps his crew tight by sexual tension, for the girl may be a she-dog but she’s nobody’s bitch. Lark’s an uncommon hero; as others seek immediate gratification, Lark waits patiently; while others kneel down to their appetites, Lark stands up. For kicks, the pack heads east from its L.A. home to the desert; coolers packed with water and steaks, they will their change, then run down rabbits and feral cats all night. They work, we’re not sure at what, but it involves tailored shirts and Hollywood. This is their life, writes Barlow, living in their big house together, sleeping in the same room: “Blood, fat, marrow, grease, sinew, muscle, guts, hide, fur, sleep. / They may twitch in their dreams when they sleep / but they sleep deep.”
The girl shacks up with the dogcatcher, and in her absence the pack is betrayed to a downmarket rival gang that, killing the competition, shuts down small-time meth cookers. Lark finds a hideout as the full-time dog of a miserable single woman who gives him queer satisfaction with naps and kibble. The new gang’s plan: send home a man-wolf for every L.A. family, deep undercover, “each dog behaving, sitting, fetching / waiting for the day the final signal is set / and the real change begins.”
Lark needs to rebuild his pack. The girl needs to kill off her dogged past. Detective Peabody, the noir-ishly mystified cop, needs to figure out why the caller who keeps threatening him in a velvety lisp is so keen to know about the mysterious deaths of the pound’s employees. Sex, vengeance, meat, love, the neverending quest for somewhere to belong, swift and decisive violence: it’s all patched over by more or less substantial forms of denial. Let’s remember our unspoken history: genocide, stolen land, murder by neglect, enslavement, oppression. “There’s blood everywhere,” Barlow writes, “but it’s the creatures at the edge, licking the corner of the ruby pool, that hold your curiosity.”
And so they do: werewolves are just more exciting than insurance companies and university regents. Blood — the bond that runs in common among a pack, the stuff spilled in sacrifice or warfare across our hearths — it’s everywhere from page one, where we find ourselves in East L.A. “where the panther black cars pause on their haunches / while their blonde women eat inside / wiping the blood red / mole from their quiet lips.” Other memorable lines: drinking tea, the girl contemplates how long she can keep her wolf self a secret, thinks: “We are all china barely mended / clumsily glued together / just waiting / for the hot water and lemon / to seep through the seams.” The dogcatcher “in love is unlikely / in its grace, / like a drunk with a magic trick. / There’s no reason it should work, / but it does.”
And Lark’s ruminations as he watches his pack rebuilt with a woman who puts out at its center:
“…there are no rules anymore
there’s only the ever constant law of
evolution
become what is or you will be
what is not.
And while you’re at it
keep on living true to
the lines of the old children’s story,
that still echo in your memory.
Go dog go.”
Toby Barlow is nudging poetry to become what is, as evocative and contemporary as Homer when he was heard by firelight.
Go, dog, go. |
