The Wound Ran Deeper
Christian Collier’s debut poetry collection brings together grief, transience, and the beautiful fragility of life and love.
Review by Alice Courtright
In his new book of poetry, Greater Ghost, Christian Collier offers moving glimpses into a dynamic world of Southern landscapes and brutal grief. “I am soaked in my losses,” the opening poem, “Boot Hill,” begins. The speaker asks, “what is time but a shaky way/ to try to measure what can never be had back?” The poems capture, one by one, losses of loved ones and strangers, both with intimate care. In one poem, “In His Place,” “wind drags its ghost” to the speaker of the poem, who looks up from watching the television. The wind, he writes, “[pulls] my face from the news of another Black man murdered.” He realizes a cousin, who was killed by a bullet, is trying to communicate with him. “I am on his mind,” he writes.
The wind acts as this kind of agent of attention in several poems. In “Monologue to an Oatmeal Moon,” the speaker of the poem is locked in “the unwonder of/ the current time that killed my friend.” The wind draws his awareness to the scene before him. The speaker says, “The wind dipped its hand into the back of the lake & stirred/ a spell I couldn’t look away from.” Like the elemental spirits in Jesmyn Ward’s novel Let Us Descend, Collier’s poems animate the natural world before him. The wind, the moon, the dove, the insect: they all become a part of his poetry. Sometimes they speak; sometimes the poetry is directed toward them. A mosquito becomes a character who provides a needed touch. “How strongly,” the line reads, “I’d been thirsting for something breathing to taste me.” In “After the Bonfire,” the speaker says,
I heard the gulf mumble to itself.
The words from its salt-filled mouth, reverberating.
It said it was tired of amassing
the names of lifeless things:
dented cans of Bud, Marlboros, bodies.
I felt the same way. I never told you, but it was all there.
Like the gulf before him, the speaker writes that he himself is tired of being a tomb. “I’m a stone mausoleum at all times,” he says in “It Follows.” Grief and loss are not only experienced and observed by the speaker of the poems, but held within the poet’s physical frame, and the frame he offers the reader.
But Greater Ghost is not willing to let death have the last word, nor is the book willing to relinquish honesty. In the poem “When My Days Fill with Ghosts,” the speaker contends with the death of another person he knew, “how his low voice now exists only in memory.” Collier’s poetry acknowledges widespread Black death, but his poems are eulogies against erasure. In remembering his own with humility and honesty, he offers dignity and justice to the many lost, subtly restoring their presence and humanity and individuality. The work of these poems is integral to the health of our society and country—Collier is a critical American voice.
And the wounds and losses don’t stop: a bullet hits the heart of someone the speaker cares for (“it broke through all the fine china in his chest”), a girl is missing and the poet searches for her by a river, a friend is dead and illuminated only by the light of twenty-seven photos the narrator keeps of her on his computer. Poems scattered across the collection mourn a devastating miscarriage and its aftermath. In “Lamentation,” a poem with four quatrains and eight rotating lines, the speaker asks, in the face of such tragedy on earth, “How do we survive night, if not by faith the bone light will come?” Illuminating the edges of the painful losses is a sliver of hope. The speaker waits attentively for its arrival like an unseen dawning that will come from beyond himself and the painful world he can see. He references the gospel hymn, “Precious Lord,” that Mahalia Jackson sang at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral. “Lead me on to the light,” the song goes.
Interestingly, the speaker is rarely drawn to respond to all this death with violence (he refuses to kill even a mosquito). He transmutes pain into prayer and unbounded pleasure: he reaches for God, for meaning, for alcohol and touch, for memory-making with kin. At certain points, Collier’s poetry reminded me of Dave Matthews’s rendition of the well-known line from Ecclesiastes: “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”
Life may be transient, but these poems are not. They will remain a witness.
The poems invoke a hope for a God who sits above these agonizing tragedies. In “Benediction for the Black & Young,” the poem reads,
Let us pray
there is a just God
at the end of all this. Let us pray
He sees the columns of our dead
on the sour buds of the street, pray He stirs & says enough.
Let us pray
The booze that drags us from one day to the next doesn’t run out,
pray the Hennessy & Crown stays put,
pray we do the same sane & intact. […]
Let us bow our heads & dream
a life that loves us better. May it be gold-hued.
In one haunting poem, “The Men in My Family Disappeared,” the speaker recounts a basketball game before yet another funeral. Basketball, in the presence of unpacifiable death, becomes a space of laughter and play and resistance. “[I]n the South,” the poem reads, “we sacred all we can to stay living, holy what is ours/ before some rabid hand wrestles it away.” There is no question that “some rabid hand” will come. The reality of death is definitively over the game and the “truth of the hearse.” Then men have disappeared to play, but the title evokes the morbid truth that the men of his family, and beloved people around the speaker, are also all disappearing from life. “I’ve yet to stop feeling the roots dying beneath my feet,” the final poem in the collection concludes.
The visceral pains recorded in Greater Ghost are compounded by the temporality of the speaker himself. For the poet is not only experiencing the roots of his family tree dying, but he is also personally feeling the way that death mocks him. Throughout the book, he’s almost killed in a car crash, he wonders if he will die in a fever, his unborn child is lost. Every friend and relative that dies is not only a crushing personal loss, but also a stark reminder of his own transience and mortality, of his ability to record and experience and witness.
In his poem “Mercutio,” the speaker reveals how awful the tragedies have been. He’s referencing particularly, it seems, the miscarriage, but the intensity of that loss seems to refract all the wounds he’s been invisibly carrying within his own person. He writes,
I knew the wound ran deeper than I let on
when it first appeared, but
I kept the truth in
as long as I could.
I carried the horror & wore it in such a manner
no one knew where I’d been or what had been taken from me.
When I could sprint no longer or stay beyond its reach,
my damage brought me wholly into its den & pinned me.
The poet offers a window into the trickster nobleman’s interior life, the responsibility Mercutio feels to keep everyone jovial and content, with glasses and hearts overflowing. And Mercutio is an apt character for Collier to work with. Many of his poems are filled with a love of pleasure, sensory touch, and drink. Samuel Johnson once wrote, “Mercutio’s wit, gaiety, and courage will always procure him friends that wish him a longer life.” The speaker of the poem relates to Mercutio’s desire to pretend the wound is not as bad as it seems. But, in fact, it’s worse. A child has been “thieved” from him and his partner. Ghosts surround him. The living, and his own life, are all terribly temporal, subject at any moment to the rabid hand of systemic evil and death. Mercutio’s wound is fatal, but the poet goes on living—yet he is transformed. A part of the speaker dies, is “perforated” by all this loss.
In Collier’s Greater Ghost, the individual lives treated, living and dead, become precious under the poet’s treatment and emotional capacity. Like Romeo and Juliet, there is no happy ending—only wounds, wonder, grief, and a lot of love. In the midst of pain and death, the poet sings his song. Life may be transient, but these poems are not. They will remain a witness to tragedy and to the reason we make art, to speak through the sorrow and point to the miraculous gift of life itself.
Alice Courtright is a poet and writer living in New York with her family. She is ordained in the Episcopal Church and her writing has been recently published in The Hedgehog Review and Mockingbird.
Greater Ghost was published by Four Way Books on September 15, 2024. Fare Forward appreciates the provision of an advance copy to our reviewer. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here.
