Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Four November-December 2024
Review of David Rigsbee’s Watchman in the Knife Factory New & Selected Poems
by Arthur Broomfield (Dr).
In David Rigsbee’s Watchman in the Knife Factory New & Selected Poems, 374 pages range over the author’s career with selections from at least ten collections. This collection opens with a sample of his new poems. Rigsbee cites poems from these new creations. In an interview with Mihaela Moscaliuc and Judith Vollmer that he says, “These poems are characteristic of the kinds of things I’ve been trying to do in the latter part of my writing career.”
This reviewer’s first approach to reading a new collection is to ask, do I like this poetry, its words, ideas and images that Wallace Stevens says we must love? Does it stir my interest, does it excite me? The second would be, what’s driving the poet, what’s fuelling (his, in this case) imagination: what keeps him awake at night and drives him for his pen and paper first thing in the morning?
“Red Wall,’ one of Rigsbee’s new poems, sparkles with imagery—is Ezra Pound his unacknowledged godfather(?)—summer is “Aphrodite with sparrows”; Melchior (presumably the wiser) is “without makeup”; and “The neighbour with the black knee brace and that gait drags her green bag to the curb.’ The idea of the spider looking for a possible avenue of escape—like the renaissance martyr burning at the stake—from the inevitability of death, nicely illustrates the poet’s notion of the clarity of the image leading to underlying complexities of life and death, its great and ultimate test “of course would be to raise the dead, to conquer death.”
I could see a brown spider
inch up a red wall,
pause, and then turn to see
if there were not something there behind
in pursuit, perhaps, before resuming
its trek up the layered shingles.
The poet fails, of course, and then the poem turns back to the real world before imagination dissolves (the image of the spider is not just profound but beautiful as well). Rigsbee’s idea of the test to conquer death, in an earlier poem, “The Exploding Man” explodes (pun intended) in “even in/ the horror of it—the slashes/ and looping florets it is not/ unbeautiful. He wishes to be,/ in dying, a better artist than death.”
In Rigsbee’s elegy, “In Memory of James Broughton,” “A drift kicks the stick loose,/ sometimes turning, sometimes right—/ though the way scarcely matters,” the turns bring the stick through various experiences of paradise imagined by the subject from “the inconstant perceptions of grace” to “this flesh as bawdy as/ the sow’s ear of a magnolia petal/ turned to catch the western sun,” to the poet’s heartbreaking lament in “the silence of the garden/ when evening had hushed the mating birds.”
In his interview Rigsbee talks about the creative process: “My poems start when the first line comes into my head or when a situation intrigues me and I want to work it,” an epiphany many poets will have experienced. I try in the face of the realization that everything in life is complex, so the clarity of images often conceals a messiness and nit-picking that takes place below the surface.’ In “The Red Dot,” he describes an image of being reunited with deceased family members “rising from their silos” and flying up the east coast. Alas the failure to conquer death haunts in
I found myself floating, knowing
how Pluto would rise from his throne
pointing earthward, not heavenward,
“Once I have these, it’s as if I have the keys to them too. They (the images) will show me where I need to go.” Pound would be impressed.
Watchman is a testimony to the state of United States poetry in this era. Its poems have what Bob Dylan would call “foundation,” a setting in a believable reality, a surface that draws us into the complexities of the underlying emotions, in Watchman’s case the big questions of existence and beyond. However, the major philosophical questions Rigsbee poses, the content, would go un-noticed if the form of their presentation were not of a quality deserved by a monumental work: images, verbs, which carry their immense load with the power or the gaiety—and so much in-between—which each demands. Poems that at their best, enthral and uplift. No serious poet, or no critic, should be without a copy.
© Dr Arthur Broomfield
Dr Arthur Broomfield is a poet, short story writer and Beckett scholar from County Laois, Ireland. His current collection is At Home in Ireland : new and selected poem. Arthur is Poetry Ireland Poet Laureate of Mountmellick.
David Rigsbee is the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including two Fellowships in Literature from The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities (for The American Academy in Rome), The Djerassi Foundation, The Jentel Foundation, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as a Pushcart Prize, an Award from the Academy of American Poets, and others. In addition to his twelve collections of poems, he has published critical books on the poetry of Joseph Brodsky and Carolyn Kizer and coedited Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry. His work has appeared in Agni, The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, The Southern Review, and many others. Main Street Rag published his collection of found poems, MAGA Sonnets of Donald Trump in 2021. His translation of Dante’s Paradiso was published by Salmon Poetry in 2023, and Watchman in the Knife Factory: New & Selected Poems, was just published by Black Lawrence Press.