Mike Amado’s The Book of Arrows
reviewed by Alice Weiss
Mike Amado’s posthumous forth book of poetry, The Book of Arrows, edited by Jack Scully and Nancy Brady Cunningham, gives us a chance to do two things, consider his poetry as Amada himself said, “In all its beginnings. . .its blooming. . .its endings,” and to consider his position as a poet in a community.
It is this last that I want to consider first. I never knew Mike so when Doug asked me to review the Book of Arrows, one Saturday morning at Bagels with the Bards, I began asking other bards about him. Many said as a reader he was unmatched, electric, spiritual, performing so fully his empathy strengthened his listeners. He was, they said, a healer. Although a slight man when he performed his voice was deep and projected, reaching the whole room, taking on a different character with each new persona. There was a selfless quality about his projection that said, “not me, but you. . .I speak of your experience.” It seems as if he was the heart of whatever community he felt himself to be part of. As such he filled an oracular role, like Isaiah or Homer. He told us stories about ourselves and in so doing healed us.
It is in this context that I consider his poems. First the communities the poems create because to be the heart of a community is also to create it. It may be that until you hear the poet’s voice you do not even know you have a community. At its root and maybe at its most powerful, Mike’s poetry creates the one community of which we are all members: we mortals.
Mike’s mortality is a restless one. He wants “to be reborn/Reborn as a gun that shoots sound.”
He morns his friend Philip “His Body lies—But Still He Roams,” “You know I’m not a bad son [this addressing his mother], just a dead seed.” In his meditation on the Iraqi war, “Yes, dead don’t forget:/Their eyes stand open like curses.” Mortality is intimate, indeed intimately connected with his dis-ease: Life, he says
is a journey of forgetting.
Every cough that barrels from my chest tires to erase
the ill from my body but it keeps growing.
I don’t believe in fate,
but now I remember who I am.” [Misrepresentations]
Who he is, as I have already implied, is also a matter of community, but the issue of identity, as opposed to mortality turns him back to human institutions. So his first community is his family and inextricably his connection to his Wampanoag forebears. But also to the confusion that race and color causes for him personally and for the larger community. In “I Love Rock-N-Roll…” he says “I’m playing around with colors in words/until I can find the color I own.” Mike’s narrator in the Rock-N-Roll poem begins in the middle of a dance, sister and brother in the mirror. The detail of the mirror, which doubles the number of dancers, also works as a complex metaphor for what we see. “She smiling into a coarse bristle brush,” and then the next line, “The kind my hair is too fine for,” requires us to see that the mirror is reflecting more than the dance. It’s allowing the speaker to meditate, even in all that noise and movement, on how he and his sister are different racial mixes. The lines that follow pinpoint his dilemma,
“I, like alabaster. I always thought
that I was adopted.
but the poem finds a release “both of us are day-glo under the black light, shrieking. . .”
It is through his grandmother that he is connected to the Wampanoags.
My native name is Spider Song
Spider is my guide,
a strong Medicine woman.
Spider Grandmother wove
the world and I live to sing about it; [Name]
It seems that Spider Grandmother wove more than the world; I found the two poems about his grandmother, elegies really, “6-13-1916 11-13-2006,”and “Talisman” to be among the most moving in the collection. But then there are the poems, or poetry, or Mike as word smith. “Like my Native blood,” he says, “poetry is a live fish, un-caught.”
The watchers around me are Baudelaire, Blake and Bly;
Shaman and Storyteller. Just to be alive with a found soul
is all the test I have time for.
We are bones swimming in soil-waves,
We emerge with a sunken jewel. . .[Test]
This collection tells the story of a guy who struggled mightily to express beauty in his life despite his long and desperate illness. There are some very angry poems about doctors and their failure to acknowledge his fellow humanity, much less save his life, and a few angry political poems. But what jumps out at me are the moments of simple lyricism:
He smiles in the bathroom mirror,
knows it looks cool with his safety-pin ears.
That thin sheet of paper
On a table cloth of pastel flowers.
Sitting in the kitchen, after dinner,
her voice the voice of God.
Prayer is her rock, fire, wood, and water.
Her whisper calls in the dawn.
You don’t have to hold my ashes.
Return them to the earth.
It is almost as if you can hear the drums that gave him his first artistic experience still drumming the poems past his time, here.
To order this book please go to www.thelostbookshelf.com $15.00 plus $3.00 Shipping
Review of the Book of Arrows by Pam Rosenblatt
In 2011, The Book of Arrows by Mike Amado, edited by Jack Scully and Nancy Brady Cunningham, was published by Cervena Barva Press, Somerville, Massachusetts. A sixty-two page book, The Book of Arrows is a well-written, well-edited, well-published, and well-designed poetry book. Even the cover with its bright turquoise color and its thirteen white-gray-black feathers welcomes you into this sometimes humorous, sometimes painful, sometimes witty, sometimes sad, and always honest read.
Poet Mike Amado passed away on January 2, 2009 after a twenty-one year long battle with kidney disease. He was thirty-three years old. An active member of the Bagel Bards, Somerville, Massachusetts, Amado also headed Poetry: The Art of Words and The Poetry Showcase, in Plymouth, Massachusetts with Jack Scully who currently continues these two poetry happenings.
The Book of Arrows is about Mike‘s life and how he dealt with everyday situations, especially his physical illness. His descriptions, metaphors, changing tone of voice, and use of rhythm make this book worthy for repeated readings. But it‘s his use of ―color throughout the book that makes this book very special.
Early in the book, in ―I Love Rock-N-Roll…‖, Amado writes, ―There are many colors in the spectrum./I‘m playing around with colors in words/until I can find the color I own.‖ Throughout The Book of Arrows, Amado uses actual ―colors in words‖ as well as metaphoric ―colors in words‖ to find out who the ―I‖, the speaker of these poems, is. Amado seems to suggest that once the speaker discovers his favorite color or colors, he will find himself as individual. He uses color in words tactfully and effectively, as seen in ―Old School Ways:
A boy is going to give himself a Mohawk.
For a summer, he lets his hair grow long.
He shaves the sides with his dad‘s razor
then dyes it purple,
[the only color of photo ink he could steal].
The colorful image of a boy with a purple Mohawk is vividly described here. Amado has the boy testing out his cultural identity.
In ―Denim-jacket Back Patch‖, Amado writes about a jacket:
Charcoal-gray with slashes of acid wash
was my first jacket. Badass by itself.
But with the Number of the Beast
patched on the back…
total freakin‘ metal.
Here Amado suggests the darkness and worn out value of the jacket is something to be cherished, admired. The ―charcoal-gray with slashes of acid wash implies the tough guy image.
Are these the colors in words that the speaker wants to own – or just kid around with - as Amado creates?
Amado‘s visual color in words is seen in ―His Body Lies – But Still He Roams where the speaker says, ―the autumn sky burned a blaze of orange.Amado paints with words here.
In ―In Prayer‖, Amado‘s sky hues change from orange to ―blue-yellow‖. He seems to like to have a variety of sky colors.
The word ―orange‖ appears once again in ―You‘ll Never Be a Pro Powwow Dancer‖. The speaker recalls:
All my regalia is gifted.
My breastplate is Crow, my elk-skin war shirt
is Lakota/Sioux.
And my ribbon shirts were made from table cloths
of red and gingham, but no one would ever guess.
All I have is my stoic, camera-hating glare
and high cheek bones to carry the look.
Those Fancy-dancers have regalia that cost thousands,
(or so they say). They have big feathers and tingle-bells
that sound like fire alarms when they walk into
the quiet men‘s room.
And all the colors match. Turquoise and orange belt
with turquoise and orange arm bands and matching
ribbons that dangle from the head band
and never get caught in their feather earrings
when they do the Grass Dance.
Amado has articulately described a Powwow dance scene, with all the trimmings. This long stanza poem works effectively because of Amado‘s colors in words! The lines ―And my ribbon shirts were made from table cloths/of red and gingham… and ―And all the colors match. Turquoise and orange belt/with turquoise and orange arm bands and matching ribbons…
Sparkle. Without the ―red and gingham‖ and ―turquoise and orange‖ color words, the situation would be difficult to imagine.
In the poem, ―She Who Gave Me Words‖, the color ―orange‖ again mentioned:
Mother is a mystery.
She styled her hair herself; even after
Two kids.
She would sway her neck when a man
Gave her a compliment,
A demure giggle, intentional coolness.
She walked me to school on that first day
Wearing an orange miniskirt
And a psychedelic blouse.
Here Amado writes playfully and skillfully. The words seem to flow gently and then twists into a lively image. Is orange the color the speaker wants to ―own‖, or call his own? Maybe or maybe not.
In ―Tea and Ghosts‖, Amado describes a cup of ―strong tea settling ―In coffee-brown mug/drizzled with half & half, white cube dissolving all the/ words that failed to make the radar or just failed‖. The colors of ―coffee-brown‖, ―half & half and a ―white cube‖ are again visual.
The images seem so real that perhaps they are actually are.
Later in ―Tea and Ghosts‖, Amado writes:
I felt a sunless chill one cold morning, five years old.
I asked my nana for a cup of tea. Churning hot yet
fragile as peacock butterflies, it held the scent of
blossoms from Ceylon, and its history of laborers
sweating in line rooms, specters separating leaf from stem.
Amado has captured those ―hot yet fragile as peacock butterflies and created an image almost as colorful as a rainbow. Perhaps the speaker‘s fragility reflects upon Amado‘s own physical health.
And the phrase ―it held the scent of blossoms from Ceylon‖ is brilliant.
Throughout the book, Amado uses the word ―white‖ as well as the word ―burning‖. In ―Watch Over Me‖, he brings these two words together:
I developed IBS
when I was 17—
I thought the dead
were watching me.
Grandma said
when the floor creaks 4
and walls seem to
push like lungs,
that‘s my Grandpa
whom I never met.
I have his features,
his hair line.
He‘d recognize
my skin tone—
White maple, newly split—
burning
before becoming
fire wood.
The ―White maple‖ going up in flames is a strong image, as is its ―burning‖. The color imagery is there. In a later poem, ―The Poet‘s Fire‖, Amado writes that he would rather be cremated than buried. Perhaps this wish is what the speaker is implying.
Near the end of The Book of Arrows, in the poem, ―November 7, 2008‖, Amado writes, ―The world is beautiful colors. Even mauve and lime-green can have their say./It took a lot of coloring to make this mural./Even a rainbow over rooftops/can change the cloud.// ‗Free at last?‘ Maybe./But we‘re here; black, white, Native,/Chicano, and queer; and with the audacity to be./At last change.
It seems that Amado‘s speaker has found that the color(s) that he would like to own aren‘t stagnant. And that there are many different colors that make up his world. What a wonderful outlook on life, especially with all the obstacles Amado faced because of his physical illness.
The Book of Arrows is probably autobiographical yet it has literary value as well. Amado‘s use of color in words indicates such prowess. This book is an excellent read!
To obtain a copy of the book go to www.thelostbookshelf.com
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