THE BAR BOOK. By Julie Sheehan. W. W. Norton, 2010.
While there was much to admire in ORIENT POINT, Julie Sheehan's second collection and winner of the Barnard Poetry Prize, THE BAR BOOK nearly knocked me off my metaphoric stool. There's been no dissipation of its predecessor's formal and technical expertise; yet Sheehan's high-gloss polish now bears water-rings, lipsticked cocktail napkins, and the additional detritus of drinkers. The marred wooden slab should segregate them--the Served--from Servers like herself, but the breaking of ranks, i.e. fraternization, also occurs. Hence love with a Suffering Bastard (first known by the drink he orders), then marriage, then a pregnant belly that becomes an obstruction for co-workers, then motherhood, then divorce.
The military reference above is intentional: Lt. General Petraeus plays a role in Sheehan's cast of characters, if only via a document titled "Counterinsurgency." The General himself is undeniably real, of course, though 's second epigraph claims that "the talking cocktails" are the collection's sole non-fictional characters. These include a junkie who orders Mudslides he never spills, drops, or drinks; though among the most memorable imbibers remain the first poem's faux reluctant guzzler of Brandy Stingers. A wary, wise veteran of mixology and, like the General's former employer, originally from Texas, she delivers what we might call a condensed war story of courtship and widowhood.
The (female) Texan's chronicle functions as a prelude for the banns that are later called in THE BAR BOOK, also a prose poem called "Liturgy of the Hours." We are, after all, warned that religion will also play a large part in these wildly ranging, compendious pages: that wooden bar itself, stained or shining, might be seen as an altar before which we kneel and beseech, as the first epigraph does--twice--that the work of our hands will "prosper."
And the "autobiographical" footnotes, which reach their high note in a marital argument consisting of refrains culled from various villanelles? They ring with the ex cathedra authority of "all's fair in love and war," "last call," and most especially in The Bar Book's finale, "On Pouring a Good Stout." Here the post-divorce mother announces that she now satisfies "her service impulse" by giving blood, yet there's an enriching ambiguity in the last sentence's "it." The logical referent is the stout, but the word swells to hold both the blood-drive bag and the body of a child: "my prayer, my possession, not quite broken." Here's to Sheehan's unshattered spirit and its continued manifestations.
originally published in THE ANTIOCH REVIEW, Spring 2011, Vol. 69, No. 2
