Lifeguard

Author: Steve Malmude

Publisher: Distance No Object (2023)

'I didn’t invent the world, but I felt it’, said Charles Reznikoff late in the 1960s. I think he must have passed some kind of baton to Steve Malmude, whose work stands before us fresh in all senses. Born in New York City in 1940, Malmude is the author of four other books: Catting (1970); From Roses to Coal (1981); I Got To Know (1997); and The Bundle (2002). So three last century and now two in this one. There’s an air of perfection around these poems – and I believe some of them are as perfect as any of us could hope to get – but this means that they don’t allow for hype from the sides. What would be the point? It would be like describing some incredible grapes you once ate. I mean that the relationship these poems instigate with the reader is so particular you’ll have to see for yourself. At first I didn’t get it, wrongfooted by the delicacy of his one and two-word lines. The inclination is to race ahead, but you have to slow down, stay almost still as you would if you were trying to locate a sound. Maybe ‘the moment / of sirens // in some / nameless / Manhattan / ravines’. Once it clicks it never lets up.

Recalling his involvement in the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the 1970s and 1980s, Malmude has written:

I went to The Poetry Project when I had poems. I’d give a reading and spot a few faces. This was what I wrote for. I rhymed a lot; it meant good luck, the election of lines and stanzas. And rhyming prolonged composition, nights with the feeling of the audience all to myself. It was a matter of pacing delicious cycles without hangovers, climbing and coasting down highs safely. I wanted to be a durable example of that fragile culture.

Great, right? And you’ll find rhymes everywhere in Lifeguard, like a meteor shower, or coins in long grass. At one point he does ‘bottles’ with ‘pedestals’. These are somehow unvoiced rhymes, dispersed in the corners, some wild elegance of typing. He writes almost exclusively (since forever?) in four-line stanzas, little cubes. That seems to be the unit: a window, a city block, a matchbook.

So we get the music of the quatrain; the music of the line; and the music of the poem as a whole, all rustling in company. Yes: ‘and sometimes the ear / fell in love / before / the  eye’. There’s a loneliness to it, with friends dead and parents dead and the ‘Harvard / avant / garde’ no substitute for anything. I don’t know when most of the poems in Lifeguard were written: I guess over the past twenty years, some maybe since Malmude moved to Maine. This remoteness gives the poet a certain mystique, which is welcome and rare today when mystique is in such short supply.  

This book is graced by a wraparound cover by the legendary Trevor Winkfield, plus an illustration in full colour. ‘My flair / for closure / is too serious / for anniversaries’ writes Steve Malmude. It makes perfect sense.