Grieving for Beginners, Matthew Flamm, New York: Hi-Hat Press, 2023. 73 pages, $18.95
Grieving for Beginners is a double debut. It is the first collection of poems by Matthew Flamm whose poetry has been published in Hole in the Head Review, Poetry East, Mudfish, and The New Yorker. A former senior editor for Crain’s New York Business, he has reviewed books for The New York Times Book Review, The Nation and The Village Voice. It is also the debut offering of the newly minted Hi-Hat Press. It is always a pleasure to welcome a new press into the fold and the promise they bring of presenting distinctive original voices. Hi-Hat does not disappoint with its initial offering.
Life is a journey may be a cliché theme that might sound trite, but in Flamm’s array of poems, it is neither a cliché nor trite. Delving into the expressive accounts of his experiences as a human coming to terms with the trials and tribulations of living in this world and realizing we are all sailing on the same boat struggling to reach home enlists the reader as crew and reminds us of our responsibility and purpose. Frail in the face of entropy and our own mortality, we are heroes to stand up to the obstacles that would crush the urge to struggle on. The allusions to Odysseus and classical mythology underscore this theme and the universality of the drama that plays over and over, again and again as we age and come to grips with the realizations of mortal existence and its cosmic joke.
His poems offer, as he attributes to the work of Wislawa Szymborska, “scratches of light” (3) that “offer direction, like constellations.” (3) They point the weary and wayward wanderer the way home and offer unapologetic, open-eyed candor to the tragic and comic elements existence presents.
These fifty-six highly personal poems spread across seventy pages conjure up New York City, a character as strong as the people and animals that populate them. While they deal with loss and the changing world that daily falls away from us as gravity and time distort and transform our corporeal being, they never sink into the maudlin or sentimental. From the decline and loss of his parents to Flamm’s diagnosis of glioblastoma, which claimed his life last year, the poems teem with the life of the persona and the city he loves, the family he adores, the companions he has chosen, and the places where he wanders. The poems celebrate the small quotidian elements that can weigh a traveler down or grind a person up if permitted to do so. These poems meet those challenges head on and face them with a determined resolve not to be flattened or ground to pulp. Flamm and Oscar, his “crazy, pit bull-labrador mix” (23) rescue dog who is “thirteen and stone-blind”(22) combat the doldrums of daily existence with walks in the city they love, the streets, the parks, and the places. Here Flamm can reflect on the vicissitudes of life and its challenges. The world may be falling way like the leaves in the trees, and it may be changing like the turning leaves of a book, but his path is straight and true unadorned with cynicism, sentimentality, or self pity.
It is a tenuous world all too familiar with current crises. It is a world of Covid, masks, a pandemic, political chaos and turmoil, but one in which you can take refuge. Buildings rise up “named after/offshore accounts” (69) like “hundred-story spires/stilettos in the sun,” (69) but cause a person to stop and “mumble, Beautiful.” (69) There is always a patch of sky populated with birds, mostly sparrows, those dusky little creatures, symbols of loneliness but who God looks after, that remind us we are watched over.
Behind these poems, the great clock of Time ticks as it does in all poems, but here it is heard a little louder although it never intrudes. There is a zen sense to Flamm’s observations, a feeling of resolute acceptance as he presents unadorned reality and its suffering without clinging to it. Grieving for Beginners is full of lessons for us all about being brave and seeing what is beautiful before us as the world falls down around us and does not appear to be what it presents itself to be. Beautiful.
© Matthew Flamm and Alan C. Reese
Matthew Flamm lives in New York City and is a former senior reporter at Crain’s New York Business. He has reviewed books for The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, and The Village Voice, and has published poems in Hole in the Head Review, Poetry East, Mudfish, and The New Yorker.
Alan C. Reese is the author of the chapbook Reports from Shadowland. His work has appeared in Rain Taxi, Smartish Pace, Gargoyle, The Blue Mountain Review, The Baltimore Sun, Maryland Poetry Review, Potomac Review, Delaware Review, Welter, Grub Street, Attic, Bicycle Review, Danse Macabre, and the Loch Raven Review. He was the editor and founder of Dancing Shadow Review and the president of Abecedarian Books, Inc., a small press publisher for ten years. He served as the president of the Harford Poetry Society for two years. He teaches writing at Towson University.
The Loch Raven Review 