Dual: Poems
By Matthew Minicucci
Acre Books, 2023
Paperback, $17.00
Genre: Poetry
Reviewed by Edward Journey
Many ideas are at play in Matthew Minicucci’s Dual, a poetry collection that examines masculinity, aggression, and violence while incorporating the semi-obsolete grammatical conceit of the “dual” – “the not singular and not plural of things.” Dual is the fourth collection of Minicucci’s poetry. The award-winning author, who is widely published in journals, is currently an assistant professor in the Blount Scholars Program at the University of Alabama.
With a frequent use of Greek words rendered in the Greek (and, thankfully, with English translations attached), contrapuntal poetry on the page, and choices to be made in navigating the text, Minicucci challenges the reader. This is poetry of intellectual discourse by a writer who is enthralled with the possibilities of language. His appreciation of language and its complexity confronts the reader with the pleasures of the written word, even as some finer contextual points may prove elusive.
Reading Dual is often akin to watching an evenly matched soccer bout in which the thrill comes not from the final score but from the technical maneuverings of the game itself. Or maybe it’s like the interplay of fine jazz musicians. Or maybe a very elegant rap. Minicucci excels at clever internal rhymes and syncopation, especially in a thirteen-poem sequence called “Thirteen Ways of Looking West” and a section entitled “Confessions.” I plan to remember his pairing of “Elsinore” / “Trojan War” for a long time. The section called “Ajax, UT” contains a lengthy poem, “William Ajax under [bullet] Round Store,” in which “[bullet]” is interjected into the quotation of the text of a historical marker in Utah to denote “unreadable portions scarred by gunfire.” The [bullet] sprays out from the marker text to obscure other parts of the poem.
As high concept as Dual may be, the personal comes across throughout and the clever wordplay sometimes becomes confessional. The poem “On the Time It Takes to Fire Thirty Rounds from an AR-15,” a meditation on the Parkland School shooting, begins its list with “One hundred and sixty-five wingbeats from a ruby-throated hummingbird” and ends with the image of a ladybug crawling along a hand on a porch as “this” – an unnameable horror – is contemplated.
Minicucci makes the reader privy to his process, such as when words are struck out within a title [“On Men Talking about Euripedes’s Seneca’s Trojan Women”]. In the poem “On James Longenbach,” Minicucci owns and embraces his mistake(?); after referencing “Pythagoras believing he was a sardine in a precious life,” he adds, “I meant previous, but let the mistake stand.”
These poems may be elusive at times, but they might also be stark naked, as in the poem “[man]”:
“
the world kills kind boys
the world kills kind boys
&
&
&
&
&
we bury the bodies inside men
we bury the bodies inside men
“
The litany goes on.
There is a lot to process here and the reader may feel a need to brush up on ancient Greek literature at times. In the stunning poem “Daedalus,” the title character’s son obligingly pets a struggling, bleeding whippoorwill, as he is “pulling off feathers by the dozen.” “I am something of an expert on the thing / not said,” Minicucci writes in “On Conversations.” “I excel at the implied expectation, this vast disappointment.” Much is said, and much more is implied, in the poems of Dual. This brave collection commands the full attention of those who venture in. There will be rewards.
Edward Journey, a retired university professor and theatre professional living in Birmingham, regularly shares his essays in the online journal “Professional Southerner” (www.professionalsoutherner.com).
