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Anvil Dust by Thomas Brezing
Endorsements of Rezing's Anvil Dust:
There is an imaginative intensity to Thomas Brezing’s poetry which is hard to ignore. Here is an artful poet adept at plucking significant moments from his growing up a blacksmith’s son in Germany, his childhood and teenage years – a poet who transforms these moments into honest and tender expositions of the fragility of human relationships and of life itself. His poems about his mother’s final years are suffused with love and remain for this reader some of the highlights of this very fine collection, Anvil Dust.
The stain of anvil dust from his father’s forge to the stains that sleep inside us, populate this startling debut by Thomas Brezing. Boyhood cruelties take on the dark deeds of men like Mengele and Eichmann in Brezing’s Germany, still recovering from war. The poet explores masculine shame and vulnerability with a plain and tender speech, often reminiscent of Raymond Carver. This is a book of reverberations ‘ringing in and out/of the one life’ from days of flag-blather and shielded welding, to the final blessings of caring for his dying mother: ‘cold delightful flares dance in the boom/ of the phantom strands.’
‘Loyal like bells at midnight
it resounded inside me,
on all my journeys,
in all my ways.’ [‘Hug’]
The poems in this collection revisit and capture Thomas Brezing’s childhood in Germany, his growing up, a blacksmith’s son, above the family forge in the Black Forest. Anvil Dust, Brezing’s remarkable collection, charts classroom memories, a disturbing boyhood’s dark imaginings and cruelties, strained family relationships, young love, Germany’s troubled past, and above all else this nomad son’s deep, awkward and complex love for his parents.
In ‘Pockets’, the young speaker, hanging upside down on a balcony hand-rail, ‘head facing a ten-foot drop’, imagines ‘how my head would split,/ hear the sound of the skull crack’. In ‘Dogsbody’ a now older speaker watches his boss astride a step ladder, ‘an A on top of the A’ and is shouted at ‘to make/ sure to hold it tight’. He pictures how he could topple him, but a sensuous, lyric impulse signals redemption: ‘A grey wagtail sings at the river nearby,/ I feel the shine and call of the marvellous forest.’
An acute, insightful observer, through Brezing’s eye and ear we see and hear ‘the gurgle and hiss/ of the water trough where the irons harden’, the ‘noisy force’ of a digger in a river bed ‘turning the water brown, tumultuous’, the teeth of the huge bucket screeching until, in the jaw of the bucket, ‘slept an unexploded bomb’. In ‘Rats’ Brezing’s painter’s eye vividly and convincingly describes a factory workplace after hours, as the rodents scavenge, ‘whisker/ through the oily grime . . . feast on pastry flakes,/ on azure-blue poison pellets’.
He writes about his parents movingly and honestly and the closing poems in Anvil Dust form a beautifully sad adagio in which Brezing speaks clear-sightedly about his dying mother and reaches, in the end, an exhilarating, imagined conclusion: mother and son become free spirits: ‘I take your shape/ from the room, absorb you into me,/ bring you with me and push us out the door./ We steal away, race down the hill,//wind blowing in our hair.
Anvil Dust, a first collection, marks Thomas Brezing’s emergence as a true poet and that Jericho Brown line, ‘I begin, with love, hoping to end there’ captures Brezing’s achievement. These poems hold powerful emotional truths, these poems resound.
Anvil Dust by Thomas Brezing
ISBN 9781-916075375, price €12.00
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