Spotlight on: Jeffrey McDaniel

Richard O'Brien

Jeffrey McDaniel, The Splinter Factory, Manic D Press, £9.99, ISBN 978-0916397791


Dear Mom, thanks for giving birth to me
and not having an abortion. 2% of my time
on Earth has been spent inside your body –
more than all of my girlfriends combined.
 

This is the first stanza of the first poem, ‘Renovating the Womb’, in Jeffrey McDaniel’s 2002 collection The Splinter Factory. As openings go, it’s certainly eye-catching and while the critical reaction to these four lines probably hasn’t been quite as strong as the horror that greeted Eliot’s famous description of the sky as a "patient etherised upon a table", they prove that poetic comparison still has the power to shock. The "2%" line isn’t actually a metaphor, but it functions in a similar way – it makes the reader look at the language used and the situation the author is describing in a way that would probably never have occurred to them.

This is McDaniel’s main gift: he thrives on the use of brash, startling comparisons, leaping across semantic divisions to throw out firecracker similes like "eyes bright as a Kennedy’s future" and "my tongue is a dolphin passed out in a elevator" without skipping a beat. It might also be his main failing. McDaniel started in the world of slam, and while much of his work translates well to the printed page, the high-octane element in which these poems originally came to life is clearly something of a double-edged sword. Like the old Chuck Norris joke, McDaniel has two speeds: walk, and kill, and he spends most of his time in the second.

When it works, it’s dazzling – in certain poems, the language rips through the reader like a hurricane through a haystack (a favourite McDaniel image), drawing gasps of wonder at his sheer audacity. ‘Driftwood Armada’ is a pyrotechnic masterpiece of compact expression, one of the best examples of McDaniel’s take on modern male angst. The narrator – seemingly the poet himself – tells us "my grandmother’s heart / was a pigeon I stuffed in a plastic bag/and hurled off a cliff" and "my national flower is a carnation/blooming in the scrawny garden of a junkie’s arm." It’s a whirlwind tour of self-destruction, McDaniel’s bluff and bluster drawing the reader straight through the words to the message: "I’m not as tough as I think I am, and I need to know when to stop."

This is McDaniel on form, riding the wave of his own slightly ridiculous exuberance and pulling it off, much like Swinburne a century and a bit before. Nearly every poem in the collection has a line or two like the ones above – eminently quotable, if a little ludicrous. ‘The Berlin Mall’ sees the poet asking "have you ever imagined / the ocean is alive, and needs to tell us something important, / and the only way it can talk / is by making waves crash". 'When a man hasn’t been kissed’ ends with an image of the narrator insulting a policeman until he "hurls me against the squad car, / so I can remember, at least for a moment, / what it’s like to be touched."

The bold statement, the ringing rhetoric, is McDaniel’s modus operandi and for the most part he gets away with it. The poems take place in airports and shopping malls, make reference to Bush and the West Bank, Jeopardy and Barry White, so in some ways it seems natural that they adopt the hectoring manner of the modern advert: everything is here, NOW, and the only way poetry can control it, at least through The Splinter Factory’s filter, is to shout even louder. There’s little room for subtlety.

Inevitably, this leads to some of the book’s weaker moments. For the most part, it’s a one-note performance, and occasionally that note can seem a little shrill and wearing, a bit like a drunk at a gig shouting in your ear all evening that he’s just discovered Allen Ginsberg, maaan. McDaniel should probably stay out of politics, and gets a little lost when he takes on religion (though there’s a great stanza comparing heaven’s gate to the border between the US and Mexico). All of his lines aim to be firecrackers, and a lot of them are doomed to fizzle out into cliché or grating sentimentality ("[I still] haven’t developed antibodies to your smile").

A fair few poems miss the mark, and although not all slam should be tarred with the same brush, it might help if he left the slightly garish-seeming Manic D Press for a page-first publisher with a more stringent editor who’d prune a few of the flabbier intros. His romantic persona can also be a little crass – think Frankie Boyle writing love poetry – but generally this theme fares best, and the ending of ‘Dear man whose marriage I wrecked’ is strikingly beautiful, in its sordid accuracy. There are a few caveats – sometimes I don’t know what he’s talking about, and I suspect he doesn’t either, and there’s a minor tendency for sloganeering over substance – but overall I’d gladly recommend this book. Jeffrey McDaniel isn’t perfect, but at least he tells you that himself.

 

 

Richard O'Brien was a winning Foyle Young Poet in 2006 and 2007 and guest editor of the Youth Members' Magazine. You can read more about him here.

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