Bluer and More Vast
Michael Hettich. Hysterical Books Press: Tallahassee, FL, 2018.
Michael Hettich is an extraordinary poet. In his two most recent collections, To Start an Orchard and Bluer and More Vast, Hettich’s brilliance shines brightly. What especially makes his work vibrant is his unique blend of vividly capturing the everyday quotidian moments of his narrators and characters and mixing these flashes with a unique and absorbing surrealism.
In “Ode” from Bluer and More Vast, one of the book’s many prose poems, the opening stanza describes a spacey kid-brother who would “take the wrong bus or walk the wrong direction.” However, the poem’s narrator begins the second stanza in quite a startling new direction:
“One day he hid himself inside his best friend, who was headed to the movies
with his parents. He and his friend sat together as though they were one little boy,
eating buttered popcorn, covering their eyes when the monster in the film chased
the family through the woods. And my brother saw us, his family, up there on the screen, he saw the monster grab our sister as though he would eat her. . . .”
This unique transformation of spacey-brother to a brother who literally takes over another’s space makes the reader do a doubletake and question the vivid, seemly-mundane reality the poet has initially unfolded.
In Hettich’s newer book, To Start an Orchard, a work that sticks with more “traditional-shape” poems, he continues his striking and engaging tack. For example, in “The Lion” the poet peppers us with everyday details in his opening lines: “. . . someone else’s idea / of a life, with rain pouring in through the window / . . . while the TV / blares cop shows.” However, it isn’t long before this beginning twists into new and frightening vision: “. . . birds shaped like private facts-of-life / fly around, shitting on the open books.” Again, we find the character transformed, this time into a lion and then a plant: “I could make my friends dare their heads into my mouth. / That felt like happiness”; “. . . he’s a flower for the rest of the day, / ignoring the bees of his own imagination, / the honey they make from his body, the pollen / they gather from his eyelashes. . . .” The reader is seduced by these turns in the poem’s narrative, willing to go anywhere with a writer who so gracefully captures the world around him before taking us into strange other-worlds.
A new Michael Hettich book, to me, is always an event to be savored. Pick up both these collections. You will not be disappointed by the landscapes he continuously and vibrantly brings to life.
–Michael Trammell