Peter Mladinic reviews
Indirect Light
by Malachi Black

Indirect Light is worth reading more than once. There are six poems titled “Indirect Light,” each dedicated to a person who has passed.  The last “Indirect Light” begins with “The only earth we knew.”  Malachi Black talks about his and his reader’s here and now, and about the people to whom those six poems are dedicated. His point of view calls to mind Weldon Kees, and his diction, Hart Crane. They are points of reference only. Black sounds like no one but himself. Writing about the complexity of lives of friends, he is humane; writing about loss, the vanished world, he is haunting; ultimately, he is redemptive. 

Humaneness stems from struggle. “For the Suburban Dead” is set in the present, a city of apartments, subways, and “palm trees.” Yet in that midst of it all, the pedestrian speaker conjures the image of a matador in a bullring, who lifts his “cape,” not against the bull, but to goad “the wind’s / untethered ghost,” the ghost of one who has passed on to “the overcrowded /underworld.”  In contrast, the speaker’s underworld is a subway.  The matador seems discontinuous, out of place. Black’s simile is wildly original, and apropos. The “untethered ghost” is a formidable adversary. Yet the speaker has “learned to hold / the loneliness of cities /  in my teeth / like old fillings.”  The matador is up to the challenge. Humaneness stems from struggle, and is conveyed in “giving back.” In the “Indirect Light” that begins “No taller than a mother’s/ waist,” the speaker says:

our street-scabbed bodies
briefly tinseled in the sun,
                                      fathered by the light 
we gathered and the light
we gave back to each other 
                                        one by one

Indirect Light is haunting, in that it’s about loss, about what was there, and has vanished. The vanished world is well represented in “Morristown Memorial.” Set in 1973, “Watergate …front page / on the Times: America, again, … in decline,” this poem is about an individual. “You tap the bag, teasing half its power / into a burnt-black soup spoon.” The spoon is a synecdoche of a city’s decadence and decline. The speaker addresses the individual, Beezy: 

There is no part of you that knows, nor can
believe the cruelty of the bloated, half- 
blind body you will heave, gowned and your
     own,
onto a gurney at the Morristown 
Medical Center on New Year’s Eve
2013

“Morristown Memorial” is not a good poem; it is a great poem, and deserves to be recognized as such. In one line “love hangs like a disco ball.” In the whole poem, compassion abides. Black doesn’t flinch from the “stamp-sized glassine envelope” and its contents. Nor does he moralize. The envelope is one detail in a razor-sharp historical document, on a time, a place, and its people, that happens to be a poem.

Black’s language redeems. There is the experience, the memory, and the thing, the
poem. Which is not to say all his poems are memory-based, but he’s redemptive in that regard. The speaker in “Old Polaroids (Pictures from a Graduation)” begins with a metaphor linking past to present, “the color / of the past: a light as amber / as the whiskey in my glass.”  In the Polaroids, “the flash caught in old eyeglasses / once noted for their stylishness” is a gateway into a street of “storefront mannequins / left in their window years after / the business has collapsed.”

The “aging passerby” is the speaker, and the poet is the redeemer.  “Prayer of the Last Prizefighter” is redemptive. The prizefighter says, “Let the star / whose dead light leans against me be my last / enemy.” Further on, “I leave to you / this lip split by the language of half-luck.”  A similar but different poem “Pharaoh’s Last Glance at the Nile” calls to mind Keats’ Grecian urn. In this picturesque panorama, the sun

—glows like the 
golden

eye of Horus, god and hawk. Such is our crop,
so thick the linseed in alluvium as soft

as oiled calfskin, it may be that our worms
are angels tapered for the soil.

Crane is in “Marble blocks once startled   from the/ quarries” (“Collapse, Collapse”) and Kees is in “I strained my eyes, blurring to mist each form/ drawn by the dark”  (“Holding a Book I Haven’t Read for Many Years”). Like those American poets, Black is original, in poems that abound with integrity and elegance. In “A Letter from the End of Days (Come In. Clean the House. We Have Died.)”  the speaker tells the letter’s reader:

                                       On the fire
line of the horizon, fold and hang
the wilted ashes that have gathered 
like white flowers in the black fields
of their wings.

In time, freshly washed sheets and clothes strung on the line, like the line and the clothespins, will be ashes. But not now, the poet says.  Read his book.  A decade has passed since Black’s Storm Toward Morning appeared. Indirect Light, about the here and now, the past and the future, is here, and it’s a killer, one terrific book of poems.

Peter Mladinic's most recent book of poems, Maiden Rock, is available from UnCollected Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States. Malachi Black's book of poems Indirect Light was published in 2024 by Four Way Books. His previous collection, Storm Towards Morning was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2014.

Malachi Black is also the author of Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection for the PSA’s New American Poets Series (chosen by Ilya Kaminsky). Black’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among other journals, and in a number of anthologies, including Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (Yale UP, 2013), The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear Publishing [U.K.], 2016), and In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence, 2023). Black’s work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Amy Clampitt House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Emory University, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Hawthornden Castle, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation (a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship), the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Yaddo.