A Review of The Teller's Cage by John Philip Drury
Review by Carla Sarett
John Philip Drury, The Teller’s Cage: Poems and Imaginary Movies. Able Muse Press, 2024.
Review by Carla Sarett
I love poems about movies so it was with a sense of keen anticipation that I picked up John Philip Drury’s The Teller’s Cage. Each of the book’s six sections concludes with an “imaginary movie.” Drury even includes “Production Notes for Imaginary Movies” instead of the usual Notes, as if the film-fan author hopes that one of these scenarios will become a short film (a not unrealistic hope, in my view). But whether writing about movies or his complicated mother, Drury’s poems offer sophistication and wit; this is a truly polished collection.
And what a collage Drury creates. He has Valentines, horseback riding poems, poems about jazz, Baroque composers, John Waters, and Facebook—and each shines in its own way. Poem after poem leaps from popular to “high” culture: A poem ostensibly about baseball ends with: “Names are what endure: Pindar, Patroclus, Atalanta, Chronos.” The high/low mix is exemplified in “Going to a Baseball Game with the Budapest String Quartet” which ends with the four musicians—
exploding into laughter, almost dancing in their hard seats, and I could picture them moving together in hilarity at Beethoven’s epic jesting, still an ensemble in the scherzo of a noisy stadium.
In a sense, The Teller’s Cage is itself a “noisy stadium” of sensibility. Drury’s too generous to confine himself to one part of the culture or even his personal life. He offers love poems for his wife, and sure enough, one for an ex-wife—equally good, by the way.
In “E Pluribus,” the poet morphs from murderer to seducer, scurrying “through neighbor’s yards and garden plots” and remarking casually: “I am legion but who isn’t?” (It’s not just Walt Whitman who contains multitudes!) If it’s a mixed-up world, this seasoned poet isn’t bothered by it, nor, we strongly suspect, is his “love.”
One of the people loitering in the sad sack of my body wants to murder you. One is dying to beguile you into bed. One wants to laze on the screen porch and view the ghost ship of a fallen ash tree. One scurries through neighbors’ yards and garden plots, trying to catch a greyhound on the run before his rush at fluttering leaves or cats propels him into traffic. I am legion, but who isn’t? It’s a word for moody, how Pollyanna merges with curmudgeon, the schizophrenia we all embody. I vote for you each day, my love, the count unanimous in this one-man parliament.
In “Curriculum Vitae,” a list poem (a tricky form, I think), Drury exhibits his ability to tell a story (in this poem, a personal story) in just the right way—and merges it seamlessly with American history. He begins with his birth, and his father, an Army reservist never called for duty:
1) I was born on the banks of a tidal river. 2) My father, an Army reservist, was called up for Korea but never got there, lucky to come down with pneumonia.
The gravitas of the opening (“on the banks of a tidal river) sets the beautiful quiet tone. By the end, the poet’s in his current life, “an ocean of foliage” in a similarly confused world (“turned upside down,”) and faced with a song of surrender; but the poet and his “last” wife “don’t surrender.” The invocation of the surrender at Yorktown lends the poem a new weight—this author understands failures and surrenders.
16) Our screen porch borders an ocean of foliage. 17) The world turned upside down, we hold on to each other. 18) “The World Turned Upside Down” was the tune Cornwallis’s band played when he surrendered at Yorktown. 19) We don’t surrender.
Or take the poem written in memory of poet Liam Rector, “The Projectionist.” In four tightly written lines, we learn both of Liam’s shocking suicide, and of the poet’s grandfather who “killed himself with much less style.” No false pathos, just a mature recognition that life is, once again, turned upside down.
Who else but Liam would gun himself down, leaving a note that planned his funeral? My grandfather killed himself with much less style, no shotgun, just a bottle of rat poison.
Drury’s poem ends with this wonderfully affectionate (rhymed) couplet.
Here is the letter I can never send my rowdy, reckless, hip, foul-weather friend.
Drury’s a narrative poet with a fan’s knowledge of film; and the mixture is terrific. In “New Song of South,” he envisions a remake of the now infamous film:
Here’s how to resurrect the film, redeem it: keep the cartoons, those spirituals of outsmarting fat bears and foxes in their confederacy of ignorance and greed, but change the frame to celebrate the owners of the stories, not cavaliers whose property was human. Make Remus wily, wild to get away, imparting lore beside the blazing fireplace to rapt black faces, his own family. It’s after midnight on a moonless night. A shadow fills the doorframe, not the master and not the straw boss, gripping a buggy whip, but a Black woman, head scarf and slouch hat, Harriet Tubman, pistol in her hand “Come on, now, hurry. Get up and follow me.”
So much to like here—but what impresses in particular is how “cinematic” the poem becomes: “A shadow fills the doorframe” becoming, quite wonderfully, Harriet Tubman herself! The “new” Song of the South, quite naturally, has a new ending that is funny and moving, with Br’ er Rabbit a “stowaway on the Middle Passage” who is “figuring out his next escape.”
Paul Robeson, his bass voice booming out, “Get on board, little children, get on board”— and one farewell cartoon. Br’er Rabbit, born in Africa, stowaway on the Middle Passage, leans back against a live oak, feigning sleep, trickster who’s figuring out his next escape.
Drury’s knowledge of history permeates his poems without being didactic or preachy. He’s spelling out the scenes as he wants us to see them—and he wants us to see history “alive.” In “The Civil War Goes On”, he tackles Civil War re-enactments (I have also seen these in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.). Drury begin with the comical image of soldiers who “haven’t bathed since 1863” —and in the style of Robert Altman, rambles through the movie, following “orders from dead generals.” At a certain point, like a movie, Drury ups the stakes to show us flashbacks “fights in basement rec rooms, sex in motels” and “a war that secretive and personal.” And so he invokes a “crime scene” in which “maybe someone’s caught, and maybe not.” Anyone familiar with Robert Altman will smile at the inevitable chaos:
At this point, though, the film is not half over. Detectives mass, cordoning off the crime scene, and everyone must reenact what happened, first in interrogations—witnesses in soggy uniforms—and then in flashbacks: fights in basement rec rooms, sex in motels, guns bought at swap meets, truck stop parking lots, the undertow of silent threats at parties. A friend or enemy could have fired the shot, following orders of a cheating spouse or acting on his own initiative, punishing the wicked, prosecuting a war that’s secretive and personal. And maybe someone’s caught, and maybe not, rain falling through the smoke of discharged weapons, even though all but one round have been blanks.
In another movie poem (I hate to pick favorites, but this might be it), “Chaconne,” the juicy subject is the murder of a Baroque composer. (Baroque music, murder—seriously, who could ask for more?) I admire the way Drury inserts himself into the film; he is listening to a sonata when the story of the murder hits him:
I’m listening to a sonata composed by Jean-Marie Leclair, who served as violinist for a duke’s court but had to live in the outskirts of Paris in a shabby hovel by a tavern. After a night of billiards, he was found in a pool of blood, stabbed in the back. And that’s a movie I would like to make.
Just like that: “And that’s a movie I would like to make”. Well, yeah! There’s so much to love in this poem, but I’ll give just a few more lines:
And everything’s a clue. As Thales says, “There are gods in all things.” The click of billiard balls, the caroms on green felt. Wagons are swaying. A crowd swarms. Police are stumped. It’s the eighteenth century.
Wagons swaying, a crowd swarms—oh my, it is the eighteenth century. As with any good movie, I won’t ruin the ending. (Ending each section with its own movie gives the movie poems a force they’d otherwise lack in my view.)
After I’d finished the book, I returned to one particular poem about the poet’s childhood, “Chameleons.” In its conclusion, Drury writes:
Our house was gone, and so were we, clinging to metaphor that bruised the truth and getting facts wrong. But the story stays. We’re still chameleons who can’t help changing
Yes, we are always getting facts wrong, clinging to obscure metaphors and telling the same stories even after the house (and our past) is history. The Teller’s Cage suggests that disguises and transformation are a part of whatever story we choose to tell. Maybe every life’s a secret imaginary movie—and if you’re fortunate, you get a director like John Philip Drury.
Carla Sarett is a contributing editor at New Verse Review. She writes poetry, fiction and, occasionally, essays. She has been nominated for the Pushcart, Best American Essays, Best Microfictions, and Best of the Net. Her latest poetry chapbook, Any Excuse for a Party, is out from Bainbridge Island Press. Carla has a PhD from University of Pennsylvania and is based in San Francisco.
I ordered the book based on the review. Thanks!