Bombing the Thinker by Darren C. Demaree, Backlash Press, 2018, $8.99 paperback
Reviewed by Scott Neuffer
A famous statue sits thinking with its legs blown off. And a poet who just wants a friend — who just wants to be whole — talks to the maimed statue, tells it dirty jokes, writes letters to its long-dead creator.
This is the world Ohio poet and trampset contributor Darren C. Demaree creates in his profound and strangely touching poetry collection, Bombing the Thinker.
The city is Cleveland. The statue is a metal casting of Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker.” From what we can gather from the poems, this Thinker was in his famous thinking position sitting outside the Cleveland Museum of Art, circa 1970, when radical anti-war protestors blew his legs off with dynamite in an ill-conceived gesture of revolution. The seventy-plus poems in Bombing the Thinker explore the incident and partial restoration of the statue from the perspective of the poet — who criticizes the misguided attack but has his own ideas about art and revolution — and from the perspective of the statue himself, who, though made of inanimate material, is able to express his thoughts in a series of poems entitled “A Damaged Thinker.”
“I can tuck / almost a feather / in my ribs, that’s how / close I am to flight,” the Thinker tells us. He wants to be real. He embraces his scars. He embraces the aftermath of violence. He aches for dignity: “I am waiting, here / because the action / here, still comes to me / & I am fucking ready.”
The Thinker even taunts his assailants, musing that if he had been blown backward, “I could have had the sky.”
As art, he knows, he’s indomitable. The world has envy “for my metal’s / willingness / to be blown / & remain blown / & above / the water’s cool, / lapping burial.”
The poet, on the other hand, is real, if incomplete. Flesh-and-blood men, of course, are also broken by cycles of violence. The two share the pain and beauty of history, that of “compromised Ohio.”
The poet wants to believe art is enough. Even bomb-blasted art has restorative power, “thick with purpose.” But the poet is mortal. Where is his dignity when “the light / itself is black dots”? Can he lose himself in the eternity of creation and re-creation? The end of the collection suggests he can: “Stare at the first / promise. / It has nothing / to do with God. / It is fullness / & the time for more.”
We’d be missing something, however, if we came to view art as some cold absolute. For the poet has filled this collection with warm “tethers” between himself and the statue. At one point, trying to make sense of the explosion, he says, “I would cradle the man, / as he would cradle / me.”
This is Demaree’s genius. He writes in terse lines that splay the metaphysical but also the beautifully human. His art connects to something greater because of the deep well of humanity pumping it up to the surface. “Some day,” he writes, “all of these / fragments will make us / both feel quite whole.”
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