The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

Book Review

Squandermania
By Don Share.
Salt Publishing, 2007. 94 pp. $10.95.
Reviewed by Laurie Rosenblatt, M.D. (Laurie_rosenblatt@dfci.harvard.edu).

Don’t skip Don Share’s Squandermania just because it has an unusual title. A real word, squandermania means something like “wanton wastage” though you won’t find it in most collegiate dictionaries. And don’t think the title is an indication that Share’s poetry will be full of hard-going vocabulary-building exercises. Actually, this smart, courageous, and passionate second poetry collection explores the intentional imprecision creeping into our language and by extension into our thought. Share writes about becoming a father and uses memory to explode the ways in which subtle and not so subtle mis-labelings squander meaning. Squandermania takes on the personal and the political repercussions of elisions and evasions, the pervasive muddlement that shrouds plain speech and obscures ethical responsibility in the 21st century.  For instance, the poem, “Meaning” begins with two seemingly flippant clichés (pp. 7-8):

It don’t mean a thing
if it don’t mean a thing
if I understand
your gist

Patience comes
to those who wait—

then slides into interpersonal territory in which the speaker has something serious at stake:

The wasp of Dedham
goes floating free—

sting me.
It don’t mean a thing

The repetition, “It don’t mean a thing,” initially a nearly meaningless refrain, now takes on a significance that undermines and interrogates its own manifest emptiness.  The poem continues this oscillation between statements and phrases that have lost meaning—through overuse, use in advertisements, or through vague abstraction—and sudden returns to significant detail, anecdote, or direct address:

Does science refute
my star-learning?

Do you?
A thing.

The poem then swings back to a (pseudo) profound gesture that resolves itself into a combined metaphor before leaping off in a meaningful play on words that lands on everyday concrete observation with surprising sobriety:

Which means
the stars are open

books.

The wedding
was a weeding

of two minds,
impedimenta such as

hollow tree trunks,
snow like rancid frosting—

In these spare, superficially simple, metrically short lines, Share makes us hear overtones of life-changing love and undertones of ambivalence. His lines use speed and terseness to avoid sentimentality and to punctuate lovely language with rhythm and with thorns. See how Share packs a paradoxical complexity back into casual and overused utterance as “Meaning” ends with bitter tenderness:

I look
at my daughter

and the thing is,
I ’m a dead man

Never overtly political or polemical, Squandermania is on the surface an ambitious, sometimes playful, meditation on love, marriage, and fatherhood in these precarious times.  For its success, Share’s approach hinges on leaving the political and cultural implications as subtext.

Share’s poems inform each other, building up meaning, so by the end of the book Share has taken the reader on a journey.  He accomplishes this in part by looking back into his own history in poems like “Honi soit…”:

So I took his violence unbeaten, as an honor, unblinking.
If my father only knew what was brewing!  Each blow
Had rectitude, blessing, intimacy, and a ring
Of the implicative… [p. 78]

Here memory and reflection complicate “fatherhood” by gesturing toward and elaborating on the emotional, financial, and cultural pressures men face. Pressures that sometimes result in aggression. Share outlines a boy’s struggle to attain “manhood” in the face of these shifting, imperfect models and competing demands. He mixes more confessional poems with poems that look out into the world. For instance in, “Father Cannot Yell,” a poem inspired by a rock song, Share speaks directly to the broader cultural issues:

A sad-lidded blonde my age
follows a fat truffle of a man my
age wearing a shrunk I BEAT

ANOREXIA T-shirt
all belly and breath—
he hasn’t been born yet!

She wears a string of stones
that follow the moon in silence,
that should keep love between man

and woman(unlike diamonds),
keep man from dreaming
in his sleep… [p.37].

Thus, Share successfully walks the line between the idiosyncratic specificity of confessional poetry and a generalized portrait of the ways in which a 20th and 21st century male evolves from boy to man to father. He brings these themes together in, “I Will Go Out For More:”

You held up bread, to make peace between us.
I held out my fist, with all the cleverness
of a backloader on dry land, plow and open claw.

In my roaring I am a father, and no father at all: your father.

I have made you something now you weren’t destined to be.
My heart is split like the soft spiky scalp
round a fallen chestnut.

You, my seedling, my days, my law.

All promise lies with you, as in the grain we raise.
At the end of each harvest, I laugh or cry.
This time, you know the ending.

Earth cracked so that the seed of wheat could enter into it.
The rain cries, and farmer-fathers cry out
to farmer-mothers in their share of work and pain.

This bread you hold out—
We must all subsist on it; and when it is gone

I will go out for more, I will go out.

Share uses longer lines, repetition, and rhetorical constructions here to bring out layered historical, cultural, and personal meanings.  For instance when he writes, “In my roaring I am a father, and no father at all: your father.” Share ruthlessly interrogates the word and the concept of  “Father.”  Father becomes at once the jealous, Old Testament roarer who by roaring reveals an uncertain and vulnerable child, a “no father.” Thus the son is in some ways un-fathered, and as a father himself has no model to guide him. Left with “no father” with whom he can fully identify, he finds himself helplessly repeating injuries. But the reader also hears the embedded phrase, “I am a father,” that simple and loving “a,” invokes the reliable protector who shoulders physical, psychological, and moral responsibility for the child’s growth in safety. By the time Share gets to the final phrase, “your father,” we have traveled the developmental course with the speaker from son to father. This son has identified with and fought against identification with his father to become in the brief space of one line a father who is “your” father: a different kind of father.

With the foregoing in mind, forgive me for providing only bits and pieces of, “An old image in arras hangings,” a longer poem in which Share ranges among languages (including mathematics), wanders into etymology and, later, through Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy using profusion—a nod to Erasmus’ analysis of the abundant style or ‘copia’—to draw a portrait of a man in relationship during our time:

A, si liceret! That I might!
And act on temptation

without beginning to die on that day
in fraught monosyllables, O to

reach the goal of copia
                       
……

…..Is it too much to ask

for balsam kisses, a salad of tongues,
for herbs and oil to garnish our super-

substantial daily bread?  The stars
are above me, but what law

is within me?  ….
                       
……….

I find the seasons with you seasonable, spiced,

Mock-heroic.  Even my faith is more faithful.
My lovetalk laurelled, my books books.

Yet you remember memory instead of me.
Once we were innocent not just nocent

and in a sense the veil of evil has been drawn tight.
We withdraw into mood as the world wars on…

This is love.  Nights upon nights we dream distinctly,
which is what makes fate so fatal.  You won’t cradle

my head in your lap, OK, so eternity will…..

The poem doesn’t end here. Share doesn’t use crisp graphite lines.  Instead he shades the edges building layer on layer until an image, a political moment, a memory, a cultural observation, a person’s evolution in relationship with family, all come together and the portrait emerges.

Published: May 18, 2008