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When I first received my copy of DEATH POEMS in the mail a couple of weeks ago, I was impressed with the production quality and then somewhat surprised when I flipped through the pages to catch a taste of what lay within and caught an impression of banality. Shortly after that, the first few reactions from loyal Ligotti readers began to trickle here at The Nightmare Network and through the TLO listerv, and all were negative, and I became rather apprehensive at the thought that this book might represent a rare misfire in Tom’s literary efforts.
The story has a happy ending, though, at least for me, because when I sat down to read the poems in earnest, I found that they worked for me. They seemed almost playful in their surface banality, and after ingesting only a few of them I began to gain the impression that they were carefully circling around the subject of death, deliberately avoiding going right for the throat and instead emphasizing the grimness of the subject matter by contrasting it with an underplayed tone.
I’ve lavished enough praise on Tom’s work publicly that I suppose I might be suspected of turning a blind eye toward any genuine shortcomings in it, of becoming a kind of apologist for it. I’ve even wondered about this myself. But I truly don’t think that’s the case here, because I simply enjoyed these poems. They try in all sorts of ways to emphasize that death, specifically one’s own private, personal death, is inevitable and inescapable while at the same time being literally intolerable. It’s an old theme, a tried and true one, but Tom invests it with the same personal quality that suffuses all his work. I particularly liked the restrained grotesquery of the semi-playful final lines that conclude many of the poems.
Maybe I’m barking up a wrong tree here, but I thought I detected a whiff of satire here, as if these poems represent an unstated grim-whimsical play on a centuries-old tradition of Puritan morals and maxims, the kind that urge one to “think much of death, dwell on it continually” and all that.
As for the technical skill of the poems, I think their appearance of simplicity is somewhat deceptive. Upon a second reading you catch all sorts of little things, little interesting evidences of artistry built in here and there. I’m thinking, for example, of the alliteration that characterizes many passages, e.g. the 3rd stanza of “Memento”: “They cried over an old comb/that still had some hairs/twirling through its teeth./Yet they laughed a little too.” Instances of assonance crop up repeatedly as well. Then there’s the neat effect in “Complexity,” whose first stanza is unmetered but whose second and final one becomes iambic hexameter, which matches the theme of all life ending with a finale of heart failure: “And all the time you thought/that life was so complex./It’s just the beat of a drum:”. The closing line after this, which says simply “Thump-thump,” serves to bring out explicitly the beat established in the previous three lines. And if you want to read it as a trochee, which more nearly matches the beat of a heart, it inverts the previous iambic pattern, tripping it up and ending the poem on an even more jarring final note, which is also thematically appropriate.
In order to enjoy these poems, it may help to know in advance that Tom is absolutely terrified of death. I don’t think I’m letting any cat out of a bag here. This fear comes out clearly in his MY WORK IS NOT YET DONE (where it receives an interesting and unusual moment of purgation or even semi-redemption in the final line). In DEATH POEMS, I see the peak moment for this personalizing of the subject appearing in “The Taste”, where Tom/the poet relates briefly the experience of being told that you will die soon, and then being told afterward that the diagnosis was mistaken, and then having to live with the remembered horror of that news in light of the fact that death is still inevitable anyway, is still approaching inexorably to arrive at some unspecified date in the future, which leads you to wish you hadn’t heard the news, hadn’t tasted how it felt. “If only you hadn’t listened to them./If only you had no ears to hear,/and no mouth with which to taste.” This sort of thing really speaks to me, despite, or actually due to, the deliberately distanced, spare tone in which the poems are written, which hints at an inconsolable horror buried deep beneath a cultivated casualness.
So in sum, the book worked for me. The little bells and whistles I noticed are subordinate to the simple fact that I had a positive reaction to it. I feel quite an affection for it, and I hope there are a few other readers out there who will feel the same. I'm glad to see that damo, at least, expresses the same degree of liking that I feel.
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