The Floating Bridge is Shumate’s second collection of prose poems, and the sustaining of this form is interesting to track throughout the book’s five sections: Far Villages, The Orange Flags of Babylon, The Bible Belt, Paris, and The Floating Bridge. Much of the power of a prose poem lies in its ability to engage the strange with a series of sharp, quick movements, and the strength of the collection lies in its ability to make these movements both within each poem and between the poems and sections.
Many places in Shumate’s book create these transitions so appealingly. In the poem “Pulling a Rabbit Out of a Hat,” we get the sentence: “In the dark auditorium, a thousand rabbits applaud” as a magician is pulled from his hat. Then we slip effortlessly into a telephone call from Sancho Panza in the following poem, “Don Quixote.”
These two poems by their titles clearly indicate the poet’s use of cultural borrowing. The rabbits surprise me in their dark auditorium, but the idea of Sancho Panza calling Don Quixote an “old fart” isn’t quite as fresh. The most successful poems in the collection are those that wisely borrow from sources and archetypes subconsciously familiar to readers but then release the borrowing in order to follow strange paths to the crux of the poem.
The section titles also indicate a propensity to borrow; they echo archetypes and stereotypes. In many cases the borrowing is so subtle and so slight that the poems become beautiful pieces, examples of why poets are borrowers and why this imagining and reimagining is such an important cultural activity. For example, the poem “Children’s Book Illustrations, Circa 1890” tells us, “They come to the edges of these pages and gaze out ... They want to join you where the wind blows the trees ... They invent a past. Try to blend in. The girl pours your coffee at the diner.” This poem relies on a world created by sharp turns, not on those original illustrations wherever they may be.
Or the poems borrow in a way that gives the original idea a new, weirder life. In “Drawing Jesus” a “teenage girl from Alabama drew a white vulture with a halo above its head” and an old woman “painted a picture of a dozen orange boxes.”
However, the poems that employ famous personas (Don Quixote, Kafka, Picasso, Dalí, Gertrude Stein) don’t have the freshness or surreal poignancy that many of the other poems possess. It’s as if the iconic personalities impede their own strangeness. The characters can’t break free from their existences before they were Shumate poems.
What does have a surprising freshness are the moments of reality sparsely sprinkled amongst the dreamier pieces. In “Chinese Restaurant” the narrator’s family always dines there after an argument. The precision of the poem’s atmosphere is heartbreaking: “As we left, my father always shook the old man’s hand.”