A Review of Lord Baltimore by Peter Ramos

Poets all too often forget their responsibility to give the reader at least a chance of making sense of their work, or they choose to be deliberately opaque to disguise a lack of meaning, of purpose.  Let us then give thanks for this fine collection by Peter Ramos, associate professor of English at Buffalo State College, which offers Intelligent, original and accessible poems that awaken the senses and reignite one’s enthusiasm for verse. 

The book opens with a thoughtful little piece, dedicated to his children, about the end of a summer day; a day defined as “an open melon / thrumming with insects and minutes” which at night, inverted and reflected in the water, is “completely awake and truer than time.” There’s a lovely sense here of magnanimity in the heavens. It’s a gentle introduction to a series of poems which gather pace and vitality: qualities which are nowhere better expressed than in the title poem. In twenty-three parts and spread over sixteen pages, it is ambitious and various, never once flagging in interest or readability. It tells of a young man and his entirely unromantic existence as a would-be writer in the city of Baltimore.

In the first of numberless studios he has high expectations of high art and “green bohemian chatter”, with rusty industrial landscapes as the backdrop to his idealism. But the reality is somewhat different — the heat, the peeling plaster, the “accumulations of dandruff, the dead skin of decades” forcing him out to the street “with a gathering unbearable thirst”. Money is short, and he takes on dead-end jobs to pay the rent, such as painting a porch, or working at a sewage treatment plant where his boss has a steel rod in his back, and is afraid that a lightning strike might “solder my asshole shut.” He drinks too much; he dines on canned tuna and a six pack, and comes home to dust clumps and mice droppings, hearing his mother over the phone asking “in a tiny, wavering voice: are you okay?”  He finds companionship and sex with a girl who could not love him — nor he her:

. . . both of us 
sweating, furiously holding on
to each other in our twenties.

and goes on to consider: 

How we shone in that place
then, freshly devirgined, stars pulsed and slow

to go out.
How pretty now when you blur your eyes:

green jewelry glittering down

black glass, crackling
as it fades to cinder, to shadow —
trash.

Beautiful. I could quote endlessly from this poem. It’s quite an achievement to depict someone alone, small and terrified and out of step with the world, with a combination of strong imagery, wit and honesty, and which asks for neither pity or approbation; which so thoroughly captures the life of one who could say:

Here’s to you, Lord Baltimore, not Poe. I’m yours
truly, sunk, un-publishable, a mere scribbler
bon vivant, my glasses cracked & knocked
askew. By noon, I’m just another
dipshit local drunk.

Such a sense of failure pervades the piece. At last, after questioning himself and his existence among the empty factories and “smokestacks, chemical sludge, the sunset bruised with propane” he decides he has had enough and:

I got out.
Walked for years, the flames
eating my skin
less and less, dumb and dazed,
afraid but steadying, toward no place
I’d ever known.  

It’s a wonderful piece of work, seeded with lyrics from Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin,” to lend atmosphere, and snippets of historical fact about Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, to add perspective and contrast. It is most unusual, in my experience at least, to come across a poem that is quite so thoroughly engaging.

But there is so much more to admire here; so much variety and energy and colour: from a lyrical, if discretely troubling hike in Virginia without books or medicine, watches or spirits:

just musical gnat-clouds
over the brook, the light-dazzle
on water’s skin
and wet pebbles

to an anecdotal piece on teenage rebellion and bravura summed up in a hundred fizzing words. From a pool-side scene in Hawaii featuring women in almost nothing but anklets, lipstick and nail polish who are, and have always been, wholly out of reach, to the simmering discontent of a group of working-class men on a hot fourth of July. Accessible maybe, but these poems lack nothing in depth or meaning, and have that rarest of qualities — they merit further visits.  

There’s a solidity of detail within these poems; an absence of obscurity or blind alleys. A Firebird takes the place of an abstract noun, a Flying V for an adverb. You’ll find Catholic iconography and ranch houses; high-jinx and hangovers; mildew blooming in the bathroom and astronomical fire. This sort of construction, this directness, can sometimes be far more efficient in summoning a memory or evoking an emotion than a more reticent, a more delicate approach; and that, after all, is what being a poet is all about. This is not to say there isn’t subtlety here — there is allusion and metaphor aplenty — but there is also real content; something to get your teeth into. Who is not taken by a description of American mothers as “sewn up & impersonal, lost in daytime cable”, or a night of love in a jacked-up GTO by a dumpster, after which “Morning wiped out the stars & seagulls cried like bats”; who cannot empathise with someone who, in a boozy, down-beat moment sees the horizon peeling open with “phony billboards” featuring “faded cars, bad lawyers & disconnected numbers”?

I found a quieter poem, but no less effective, in “Viewing”. It’s the contemplation by a neighbour of a retired schoolteacher, husband and father of two, lying in a casket — “more wax / more chemicals than human meat” — alongside photographs of him attending communion, playing golf, the saxophone, tennis. Where, he wonders, is all that history now? They would meet occasionally taking out the trash:

in the starlight – diamond
crumbs on a backcloth — to stop
with a friendly word.
We weren’t especially close. 

It’s a fine poem, if a little incongruous in its sobriety in this thrilling, inventive and affecting collection presented with a sure touch and a refreshing vocabulary. The dominant tone here is one of nostalgia; a fond recollection of adolescent spirit, tempered by misdeeds and embarrassment, with questions about identity and belonging posed along the way. There is little anger or recrimination within these pages, although you feel that at times it might have been justified; instead, what comes across is a benign maturity, a sort of kindness. When poetry is so often dry, or heavy-going or, worst of all, cloyingly self-indulgent, these verses are nothing less than a surprise. Like finding buddleia breaking through the sidewalk.