by JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp
For me, summers are for regrouping and re-reading
favorite books. One such work by David
R. Altman, “Death in the Foyer,” continues to sink the plumb line of my
appreciation for his attention to instinct and motive each time I read it. “Death in the Foyer,” published by Finishing
Line Press in 2014, is Altman’s debut chapbook. His website can be found at http://www.davidraltman.com.
“Death in the Foyer” contains a series of vignettes
that convey the message nature may contain
mysteries, but people keep secrets.
The first of
these is the book’s titular poem about a man who suddenly, and without
resistance, succumbs to an aneurism in his home’s foyer. Altman’s use of an
omniscient voice places the reader in an awkward position of knowing more than
the dying man’s devoted wife whose “warm fingers [protect] now what no longer
needs protecting.”
Suddenly, the reader knows perhaps more than they should.
Without warning, we’re in on it as the speaker divulges how, “his final
thoughts were of wives and children;/and secret friends who knew him
well,/thoughts that he will share now only with himself.”
And we know her, don’t we? This woman of “soft
pleas” who emerges from “a living room landscape of family photos and dusty
Bibles.” She is the hearth keeper; albeit, possibly not the first one as
“wives” is unmistakably plural.
I love this poem because every time I read the last
stanza, I have to ask myself if I am obligated to care more about this man than
the clearly ambivalent speaker. Altman writes,
He was to die upon a rug he used to
vacuum
and had admired from a distance.
Now moving toward a new life,
less worldly than the one which at
that instant he was leaving,
but a new life, just the same.
We have to ask ourselves, what type of man (or
woman, for that matter) sinks so comfortably into an “unexpected” death? Could
it be one with “secret friends” suddenly offered a clean slate? This negative capability allows the question
to linger as long as we wish, as the dying man only “[moves] toward a new life”
when we are ready.
More dramatic but equally compelling is the poem,
“2:17 a.m.” Here, Altman carefully attends to setting, mood, and plot. We exist
in both space and time, and the speaker uses the poem’s title and first line to
create a sense of tension that does not dissipate even when the danger has
passed.
Awakening
to the sounds of destruction,
the family presses one another to
the hardwood
Unable
to move or see or understand
in one final act of unity they pray
silently, hands touching.
Bullets
fill the room, shattering photos and jewelry and bed posts
While small children, life faceless
rag dolls, curl beside their mother
Each
family member pinned down like a spider beneath a jar
waiting for the inevitable.
Suddenly,
things stop.
The
crackling glass still rings as tires screech beyond shattered blinds.
Quiet sobs fill the void
where gunfire had been.
The
father sighs, his family safe, his home destroyed,
His secrets so rudely revealed.
He
peeks outside, in the dim light,
thinking only of how badly his
grass needs cutting
and whether his house will ever be sold.
Here, the poem’s story is mirrored in its visual
rhetoric. The first stanza consists of alternating but uniformly indented, end-stopped
lines connoting order even in the midst of disaster. It almost does not matter that a solitary line
interrupts the terror in the night because the second stanza, with its craggy indents,
betrays a father’s secret life.
While I personally find “Death in the Foyer” and “2:17
a.m.” two of the most intriguing poems in Altman’s first collection, this
chapbook’s scope is far reaching. He explores
the lethal neutrality of animal instinct in the poems “Wake Up Call” and “Her
Woods” in the same proportion as the will to live and love in “The Groom’s
Mother Has Cancer.”
“Death in the Foyer” can be found on the Finishing
Line Press website at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/death-in-the-foyer-by-david-r-altman/.
JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp is a Lecturer in the English
department at Kennesaw State University. JoAnn received her MFA in Creative
Writing from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. Her poetry has
appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Public.Replublic.net, and Bigger than They Appear: Anthology of Short Poems.
