A kind friend, knowing that I was having a bit of trouble dealing with the deaths of my father and mother, sent me Kristin Prevallet's book I Afterlife, and recommended that I read it in the course of coming to terms with my feelings of grief and abandonment (if that's what they were). In any case, he said, it's a beautiful book, how can you lose? Prevallet's book is striking with its beautiful cover photograph that I came to understand was representing the ordinary sort of parking lot in which the central action takes place, and a numinous orange stain--the reflection in rain of a traffic cone? The inscription of a traditional sunbeam?--glowing downwards from the top right hand corner. We seek to make sense of whatever events befall us, that's just human nature, even when they are inexplicable.
In a sense, I, Afterlife is a kind of detective story, as Prevallet struggles to account for her father's suicide. She creates an eerie cut-up poetry out of fragments of the police reports that accompany violent death, and one section is made up of photographs over which the naked eye travels looking for a clue. Why did he go to a doctor in the first place? Did prescribed anti-depressants lead to a downward spiral? Who bought that gun, who drove that car to its fatal destination--the man or the pills inside him? He pulled into a parking lot of an athletic field in Colorado, then papered the car windows from inside with newspaper--presumably to prevent the car from being splattered? Or to save the sensibilities of those who would inevitably find him? Prevallet's verse fractures and insinuates to match the twists of the living trying to get inside the head of the dead man, but remains remarkably supple and inventive. I never could tell, from page to page, what discovery she was going to make next, but the poetry keeps you going like a house afire. Stylistically the book leaps from mode to mode, almost as if the poet is jumping from hummock to hummock in a swamp that threatens to submerge her at any moment. Essay gives way to lyric which gives way to proscription, parable, warning, as the story keeps moving westward, like the sun. (This book is from Ohio's worthy Essay Press, a project of the editors Eula Biss, Stephen Cope and Catherine Taylor to explore and irrigate traditional essay form with the strong waters of poetry.)
Eventually memories of the father's entire span of years emerge, so that a more rounded picture appears. In one powerful scene the poet and her father take a hike in the Rockies and encounter a figure she comes to understand as a ghost--an old man so dedicated to the mountain he has slipped into an identity vortex, he has become the "spirit of the mountain," and yet the extraordinary thing about this Walter Scott-like character is that, as the poet compares her father to this specter, she realizes something she had not known about him, that he was "walking ahead of me with a pace not at all suited for the terrain." His questions, she sees, are unrelated to his experience--there's a disconnect, a troubling removal from the real. After his death these disparities assume the heightened density of poetry. "Afterlife" itself a comforting fiction, which elegy heuristically contradicts.
"Afterlife is a tidy package that presents a simple truth," writes Prevallet. "Elegy is the complexity of what is actually left behind." The book has a furious energy that takes us, emotionally and intellectually, to a place where we understand why the brochure the police give to a suicide's survivors advises not to make shrines, at the same time we understand why the shrine-making impulse must be obeyed and given living space. The ineffability of suicide, the porous membrane between life and death, becomes a scratch in the surface of reality. Even social questions seem to lose their edge--so strange and moving to see Prevallet, the most socially conscious of poets, try to grapple with this loss, this disappearing certainty. It is a terribly affecting and beautiful book--just like my friend said--she is a genius, pure and simple.
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