People Once Real
People Once Real, by Richard Hoffman. Lily Poetry Review Books, 2023. 83 pp.. $18 (paperback).
This exquisite, poignant, powerful collection of poems by Richard Hoffman, the author of the memoir Half the House and now five outstanding poetry collections, is a book of poems for our times. In fact, his body of work might constitute as apt an elegy for modern America as we could get—though such an elegy would necessarily be a cross-generational, cross-cultural mosaic of laments, testimonies, and unheeded prophecies from many quarters and disciplines.
Hoffman is a master elegist, a gift developed in attentive suffering that began as a child. Two of his younger siblings died young and their passing is a recurring subject across his work. A child with empathy and compassion sees more clearly than most anyone. What others don’t notice, they do. What others don’t anticipate, they do. It’s a gift that is also a curse, like Cassandra’s gift of prophecy, to witness and testify but to be ignored. As an adolescent Hoffman was a victim of sexual abuse by a trusted community leader—trusted with, it turns out, a reputation that was winked away, a fact that when it surfaced compounded an already profound sense of betrayal.
If your soul is as tuned to survival, to danger and the threat of danger, as Hoffman’s is, then the direction you see our country and the world going, is not some awkward dance of progress. It’s not that cliché that swings a few steps forward and hobbles a step or two back, frustratingly slow, agonizingly tolerant of unnecessary suffering, but one that nonetheless sustains a sense of hope. Instead, we have a danse macabre, performed by those who married rampant greed to bigotry. The bigotry that makes select people less than real, therefore disposable. Bigotry that seemed to be on the wane, but is in fact in full renascence, delivering and preparing to deliver more suffering across the country and the world, first against our most vulnerable populations and eventually against all of us.
Fittingly, the first poem in People Once Real is “A Letter to Walt Whitman in the Earth” and Hoffman mimics Whitman’s voice:
Do I sound bitter?
Very well then, I am bitter. I am large. I contain
our entire betrayal, Walt—caged children, murdered
citizens, poisoned water, spent uranium— by those
for whom democracy’s an obstacle and humans
resources.
The betrayal here was Whitman’s seductive optimism, his appealing vision of an America that embraced the world, in its diverse populations, in its energy and openness to the new and different, and in its vision of a great nation, but:
Your beautiful roughs are trained to kill,
contractors now, not camerados.”
Or ICE agents, enlisted or deputized, who do what they’re told, like programmed robots.
Whitman was/is a prophet of America and American poetry. Like America, he meant well (we assume, or I assume). He had genius. But he was woefully wrong about us, our character, and the open road that brought us here. As a prefatory poem “A Letter to Walt Whitman in the Earth” sets the tone for what is to come.
People Once Real is divided into three parts. First Mundus, then Infans (and third, like a simple, parsed mathematical equation, two addends with a conjunction that tells us to combine: Mundus et Infans (The World and the Child). What is the sum of this equation, two or one? I think it is one, a compound, each part dependent on the other. Neither survives without the other. They are one. (More on this later but Mundus et Infans was the title of a late medieval English morality play and a poem by W. H. Auden written during the Second World War.)
The first poem in Mundus is “Horizon: November 14, 2016.” This date marks the night of a super moon, a week after Trump’s first election win. Hoffman expresses impatience with all the post-election talk: “Talk about fear to hide fear. Talk about talk about talk.” Near the poem’s end there’s this:
A day may come soon
when we pay with our lives for the lives
of our friends.
This was written before Trump took office; before the pandemic; before the second term. And perhaps now, at last, and hopefully not too late, we can all see that that time is now.
The next poem in Mundus is called “Betrayal.” Whitman makes his last overt appearance in the collection, providing the epigraph (“One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person”) and pointed echoes in the language:
neurons split the atoms
belonging to me, belonging to you and
corruption runs in the gutters,
and celebrates itself,
laughing and only mildly ashamed.
The title names its theme. The poem speaks for the most innocent victims of this betrayal, “children without the choice / not to believe.” Children have no or only limited agency. They are compelled to trust. It is why they are vulnerable. Hoffman knows this from experience and returns frequently to societal indifference to children. Betrayal is the poem’s theme but despite its frequent presence it is not the collection’s theme; this, as we’ll see, is our responsibility to others.
All of the poems in Mundus look at the world at large, a political world that predates Trump as a working politician. The levers Trump now manipulates and that Hoffman writes about in this section (drones, deportation, corruption, prisons, consumerism, undermining of science, expertise, history, facts, language) also predate Trump. So I am done with Trump as a referent for this review. Hoffman is not looking at one individual, one party, one institution but at us, all of us, including himself. In “D(r)one,” a short, precise, smartly rhymed poem in the simplest language possible without condescension, he writes
What was done was done
in our names; we ourselves
would never have done
what was done to anyone.
We wanted to be good,
polite, obedient, fun,
wanted only not to need
to ask What have we done?
And yet, in our names,
what was done was done.
Hoffman is a moral poet, not some hectoring, vengeful, finger-pointing after-the-fact moralist, but one fully engaged in our living moment who wants us to be better, to curb what he calls our “capricious hungers” because they have costs, obvious or hidden, and what is being done for our appetites or in our name is our responsibility. He connects us to this responsibility firmly and compassionately, sometimes with tragic humor.
In “Wurst Haus,” Hoffman imagines a dream where he is a waiter in a restaurant in Pennsylvania, his German grandmother is the owner-cook, and Brecht and Rilke are customers. Rilke (1875-1926) begs Brecht (1898-1956) “to fill him in on all that happened.” Brecht tries to dodge the responsibility of revealing what happened in Germany between 1926 and 1956, but reluctantly relents.
Rilke keeps shaking his head, saying, ‘How is this possible? How
could this have happened?”
Rilke is inconsolable with the news. Brecht tries his best to help him.
“There, there little bird,” he says,
“You needn’t worry. This is the future. We’re in America now.”
(My wonderful mother-in-law, who passed away in late 2018, spent the last two years of her life saying precisely what Rilke said about her own country, How is this possible? How could this have happened?)
In a number of poems, Hoffman speaks directly to his response to our times. In “Vaccine,” he declares
Words don’t come easily to me.
I used to think they were afraid of me,
they hid in my chest, in my belly.
Will the right ones make the dying stop?
What word is there for the way
some words unsaid erase you?
For our hope not to hurt again?
For what to say to make the dying stop?
In “Live Coverage” he asks for help:
I need a few suggestions just to get me started how to talk about the way
not a blessed thing I believed,
not a single axiom holds anymore, like the guy on the Weather Channel
out in the middle of the storm,
waves crashing on the seawall, wind roaring and popping in his microphone,
with one hand cupping his ear,
words blown away or drowned out by thunder and the roar of the sea,
camera lens streaked with tears.
Hoffman has a way with metaphor, simple or complex; and he also uses the rhythm we gather from lines long or short with equal facility and aptness: compare “D(r)one” with “Live Coverage” where the short lines in the first are both tight and soft enough to be read in a whisper and the elongated lines of the latter have the twisty immediacy of unravelling reality.
In “Last Hope” Hoffman addresses a dreamt future:
If you ever come, my dreamed of world,
the one we almost had, I will be gone
with all the others.
He offers a word of advice to this new world
bring people whose hearts are less hesitant,
new people, better people than we were.
He would have us measure people’s hearts by their eagerness to protect not only our personal selves but others too. Hoffman further identifies these people in “They That Mourn” in the language of the Sermon on the Mount:
Blessed are they that remember….
And blessed are they
that mourn the animals,
that weep for the burning trees...
…that turn
the light out, let the night in
and contend with sorrow,
that imagine
what once they are gone
they might wish they had done
and in that darkness begin.
It’s a regretful wish and we can either become those better people or join Hoffman in his dreamt future wishing for them.
I give the final word in Mundus to “Why Not Is The New Normal,” which comes midway in the section, a poem about aging or wisdom, or both. Hoffman tells us:
I passed the things I passed too fast.
Now I walk slowly, listening,
as if for a voice,
to the gravel crunch beneath my shoes.
No future was anyone’s friend for long.
With whatever’s left let’s see what’s what.
Because why not? Because we are here and that’s enough.
The poems in part two, Infans, are personal poems of love, loss, grief, alienation, survivor guilt, and familial relationships. The poems are not specifically sequenced but they do come in clusters of life stages (sibling relationships, parental relationships, marriage and parenthood, one’s own mortality). Here are elegies, odes, prayers, hymns, love songs.
“Late Elegy,” a poem about his brother, is founded on a memory of himself and a younger brother eating flower blossoms, one petal at a time, seasoned with smuggled salt from the kitchen.
The part of me that might have
remembered what we said was
not yet alive. I only know we
wanted so much to be good
we must have believed we weren’t.
One petal at a time, a little salt.
My brother and I ate flowers.
This blend of childish innocence with later, uncertain awareness—“we must have believed we weren’t”—has enough complexity to be both incomprehensible in the moment, yet responsive to dimly sensed judgments from the adult world. There is also the remembered joy and comfort in living the perplexities of childhood, not alone yet complicated by not yet experienced loss.
“Benedictus” presents the suffering of a mother who has lost a child, a mother devout but now cut off from the comfort of her beliefs by the full weight of her loss.
You give me skies and trees
and rivers and days and months
and years in return for my child
and his laughter and all we knew
together and all we never got to do
together and think it’s enough?
She savors her bitter black
coffee, her only breakfast,
sun coming over the houses,
day’s first long shadows.
Hoffman treats the complexity of grief with the respect it deserves, recognizing its trauma and the trauma’s long shadows. And like almost every poem in People Once Real, the language, the voices, are haunting, knowing, real. That second together in her prayer arrives perfectly and hits hard. The enjambments around God’s gifts and what he took away, acknowledge the bounty but shatter it with loss.
In the poem “Album,” Hoffman responds to a photograph of his parents dancing together.
They turn to me, my parents, as if they see me….
Young,
filled with necessities and niceties and faith,
they wonder at me: what are you staring at?
As with “Wurst Haus,” stop any story in time or advance it further in time and comedy may turn to tragedy or happiness to sorrow. Or reverse. Looking over their shoulders, they are happy, complete—for now.
Throughout Infans, you see our imperfections, our passed-over opportunities. In the poems involving Hoffman’s father, in “Mt. Moriah” for example, the taciturn father and son are on a hike. Perhaps they are grieving the same loss or losses in isolation and this was someone else’s idea, this hike.
My father stopped, sighed,
reached down deep in his bag,
‘Let’s get this over with,’ he said,
aloud, to no one I could see.
The poem’s last line makes clear that both father and son are absent with each other. These are human moments where nothing is simple, and at times we rise and other times we want to rise but can’t, stuck in overwhelming silence. In the short poem “Hurricane” a father and son walk, surveying post-storm damage together. They come upon downed, live electrical wires.
Then I was lifted
on my father’s shoulders.
Like “Late Elegy” it captures a memory from early childhood, young enough to be lifted onto his father’s shoulders and too young to fully know the danger his father is rescuing him from. The child marvels as the electric wires twitch and spark, a view from two vantages points, one elevated in height and one elevated by time. Both touched by seen and unseen love.
Later there are poems of reconciliation and surprise: “Dusk,” where death is another instance of being picked up from an outing by your parents:
Whether or not there is a river,
I will be by a river. My mother
will send my father to fetch me.
He will toot the horn twice and I
will wish for more time.
The poem is a dream of comfort built from routine memories of comfort.
My father clutches and shifts,
then touches me on the shoulder,
staring ahead, eyes on the road.
In “A Prayer for the Souls in Purgatory” Hoffman imagines a return from the future (which is the present) to the past of his childhood where he looks
for what the boy did
just after what was done to him
to see if he can discover who knew or maybe suspected his abuse, while understanding that (his) shame and (their) presumptions had hidden everything. In the final lines, the purpose of his return changes.
I forgive
their inattention: not one of them
from whom I would
withhold untroubled dying.
The placement of “I forgive” in the poem’s last verse, above the lines it leads and almost to the end of the right margin, isolated, at a safe distance. Forgiveness delivered, yet, apart still. And to go back to the poem’s start—the simple diction of did and done is poignant, buried in scar tissue, distanced by time, yet present. Here Hoffman underscores with understatement to profound effect. I forgive but can never be less than wary.
Necessarily and beautifully, there are love poems—the surprise of love, the fragility of love and life, its strengths and protections. “Marriage” declares:
O my love there is more,
much more, still, to know
of love than how to continue.
“Comfort” reads in its entirety:
Hearing the rain on the roof above our bed.
Saying the roof above. Saying our bed.
The next to last poem in Infans is the gorgeous “November Suite,” a six-part reflection on a life’s journey. It is a kind of itinerary of considerations that Hoffman unfolds like a newborn safely home, wrapped in its hospital blankets:
1. At first I held out my hands, then my arms,
to welcome and hold
all that was offered. In time I learned
that none of it could be abandoned….
Having wanted so much
having accepted so much, now possessing so much,
what could I do but carry it?
What’s accepted is life, not possessions. It’s the joys and sorrows of life. All of them.
2. A song about a song is a kind of prayer,
and I needed to pray,
but failed for the need to be sure I was heard.
Life is given; surety is denied. Compassion, comfort, love for one another are the necessary answers to our prayers. Section 3 shows prayers are answered by us, for us:
Who else might spare you
from becoming someone else
again?
…. so I can say only that tonight,
as you quieted, and your breath
slowed, your tired white head,
resting on my shoulder, seemed
heavier and even dearer to me.
“November Suite” continues, touching on grief and memory, and concludes with this:
And we
require of ourselves and one another
too many things we imagine necessary.
People Once Real’s final section, Mundus et Infans, contains a single poem in twelve parts, thirteen if you count its coda, dated May 24, 2022, which you need to count. The entire poem is about the violence children face, a barbaric tolerance for human sacrifice that we have seemingly always tolerated. The first section, After the War, begins and ends in frustration:
People once real, who’d love their lives, and one another,
who might not have meant to harm but only warn me—
in what first tongue did I compose those poems
that calmed them, that bid them be silent so I could sleep?
I need that language now. They have returned. They circle,
insistent, whispering: same war, same war, same war.
The second section mixes details of great works of art on the theme of The Massacre of the Innocents (and the profitability of these works at auction) with scenes of devastation on the global stage, signaling the ongoing profitability of such destruction. (I am going to skip the third section for a minute.) The fourth, “Hold that Pose,” comments on a photograph of Thomas Edison, his expression fierce, focused on his adversaries, demanding, “Who owns the light?” It describes an artist-rendering of a satellite carrying guidance systems above a famous photograph of a blue marbled earth, noting,
better, much better than
a charred orb sulphured yellow
as a smoker’s fingers.
Of course, what we have, not from a distance, but on the ground and in the air above is the sulphur-charred destruction. In section five, Hoffman takes issue with St. Paul:
I
call bullshit on Paul: When I was a child,
I spake as a child, in pain, and asked
my questions clearly, in a sweeter voice
perhaps, but not less serious than now
when clarity remains at least as hard and
honesty much harder. I still play dead
to keep in practice because you never know.
Section six is a beautiful elegy for Patrick McSorley, one of the victims who testified against the Church-protected child abuser, the Rev. John J. Geoghan. In a piece called “Tribute,” Hoffman writes of McSorley:
This man lived
where men fear
what they know
and knew what
he knew and
spoke the truth.
Seven is a dark satire called “Progress,” a tangled mythic-theological tale featuring Iphigenia and Isaac, a computer search (**ERROR: 404: NOT FOUND**), a ram in a bramble, and a happy arms huckster. Eight, “In the Mean Time,” a brilliant, double-edged sword of a title, succinctly describes disaster:
Between the launch and the blast
we drank to our prosperity
The boys are off to prison or war.
The girls carve crosses in their thighs.
Sirens, blue lights, shots fired.
Even enough is not enough.
The server’s down. The safety’s off.
History’s a hoarder’s burning house.
Nine is called “Isaac’s Dream,” a nightmare. “Who’s there,” demands Isaac. Could be God. Could be Abraham. That’s the nightmare. Ten is a morally fractured nursery rhyme. Eleven is horrific testimony from a child soldier about his recruitment and training. Twelve is called “Seer” and it stars Iphigenia, like Isaac, or so the stories go, rescued from the sacrificial altar to a temple in Tauris
where she makes prophecy
of the single thing she knows,
denied by all who seek her:
children will be sacrificed
for advantage, for victory.
The poem “Mundus et Infans” is a kaleidoscope of images, scenes, tones that indicts us for our consistency over millennia tolerating the unspeakable, excusing it, justifying it, deprioritizing it in favor of something more important than children, than life. Freeing us from any accountability with abstractions: Freedom (guns everywhere), Free Trade (stealing resources from former colonies), Religious Freedom (protecting clergy who abuse children; denying LGQBT+ citizens’ rights).
Lastly, Coda: Uvalde, TX, 5/24/2022. Perhaps Hoffman was done with Mundus et Infans when the news of Uvalde broke. These horrors come so frequently. Will we ever tire of killing children? Will we ever tire of doing nothing? Hoffman starts, “Another.” Stops. “No, not another, not / that cushion / of a word.” He stops again. Then, he describes himself on the grass outdoors watching ants with his granddaughter. One of the ants is carrying something. The granddaughter decides what it is, in the language of a child:
That his dead
brother he
bringing him home.
In the English morality play Mundus et Infans, Shame is the name Folly gives to Infans once he’s been corrupted and it is Mundus that corrupts him. In W.H. Auden’s poem of the same name, Infans is a man-baby (“cocky little ogre”) who “thinks as his mouth does” for whom
We should
Never dare offer our helplessness as a good
Bargain, without at least
Promising to overcome a misfortune we blame
History or Banks or the Weather for; but this beast
Dares to exist without shame.”
Now, finally, back to section 3 of Hoffman’s Mundus et Infans. It’s a brief poem called “Sentinel.” It describes a moment when a three-year-old is shown his birth photo. “‘No!’ he says, / Not me! Not!’” But, yes, it is. We are not three-years old. It is us. What Hoffman does is what history does, when not lying. It’s what art does, poetry, music, science do, and what any endeavor at truth-telling does. It reflects us back to ourselves via our actions. The harm or good we do. The harm we allow in our name. A three-year-old can deny his newborn image. Older, he’ll see the photo again and recognize himself. If we are to have any hope, we will need to recognize ourselves as ourselves if we are to become better people.
Hoffman’s poems scare, inspire, and comfort. They’re generous, insistent, and beautiful in the way that only truth can be. In “Horizon, November 14, 2016,” Hoffman wrote “A day may come soon / when we pay with our lives for the lives of our friends,” the poem wasn’t done. He continued:
What else did we ever have
to pay with? What else were we ever for?
Every ripple on the lake is a lick of flame.
People Once Real deserves many, many readers and much more attention.
Reviewer Rick Larios is a retired educator who lives with his wife, Cara, in Queens. There he awaits the end of the world as we know it without feeling fine.