November Weather Spell by Robert Fillman
Main Street Rag, 2019
In his poem “The Installer,” Robert Fillman offers an ode to his father, a blue-collar laborer who—“dust in his eyebrows, forehead / sweaty and dirty, arms tired”—painstakingly positions misshapen floor tiles together “like grace notes in a Chopin / nocturne.” Fillman’s celebration of his father, and the working class more broadly speaking, imbues his recently published collection of poetry, November Weather Spell, with a grittiness that is both refreshing and alarming.
Consisting of twenty-six poems, November Weather Spell depicts a world where toughness matters. There’s the schoolmate named Joe who “packed his snowballs with stones” to punish bullies; there’s the dilapidated outhouse alongside “an old, abandoned trailer in the woods” where a “grandfather, uncle, and / father” huddle in the cold and “breathe its bitter / warmth”; and there’s ninety-one-year-old Aunt Mimi who ignores littering signs, judgmental neighbors, hazardous falls, and her daughter’s threats of a retirement home to dump six wheelbarrows’ worth of leaves down the gulley behind her house. Throughout the collection, Fillman celebrates these sorts of characters, insisting that there is something beautiful and earnest in their unflagging determination.
Yet Fillman never slips into nostalgia for a simpler, more rugged existence. Similar to his father’s tilework, which he alternatively describes as beautiful art and dirty labor, Fillman tempers the allure of this tough world by revealing its utter brutality. In the collection’s first poem, for instance, a dead racoon lies exposed in the middle of the road as indifferent drivers race past. Vulnerable and undignified, the carcass offers another pitch to the collection that is sustained and amplified in poems such as “What Killed the Cat?”—in which a kitten “flicked its tongue at the raw / peeled-back skin of its mother, / trying to bring her back to life”—and “Some Elsie,” in which a fifteen-year-old girl is “flaunted,” “strummed,” and “groped” by “big boys” who share “tobacco juice stories / she was never meant to hear.” In poems like these, Fillman reveals a violent world whose victims all too often go unseen by the characters around them.
And this is where Fillman really shines. November Weather Spell does not simply acknowledge two different realities: one admirable, one ugly. Instead, Fillman structures his collection so that readers might recognize that these different realities are occurring simultaneously. November Weather Spell is littered with subtle intertextual references, which collectively destabilize readers’ points of reference. Might Ricky, the bleeding boy in “Rattails” who “crouched / barefoot beneath his uncle’s porch,” be the narrator of “Day Breaking” who daily finds his drunk “uncle / propped on our porch”? Could the boy who is struck by a car while “playing ball / in the narrow alleyway” in “Things Like This Happen” be the same one who wishes the police would arrest his “crazy old / neighbor on Franklin Street, [who] used to steal / our balls” in “Killing the Devil”? And is the man bathing during a thunderstorm in “Superstition” the same person who spends “the morning in the tub” before eating a pie “naked and wet” in “There Should Always be Two”?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Whether these connections (and there are many more) are, in fact, accurate is largely irrelevant. What’s important is that November Weather Spell invites such questions, allowing for limitless reconfigurations that blur the space between poems and between the admirable and the vile. Fillman’s textured poetic collection challenges perspectival certitude and creates the imaginative space for readers to contemplate anew the interrelatedness of a world in which people are both subjects and objects, primary narrators and characters in other people’s stories, victims of violence and perpetrators of injustice. Such multiplicity encourages a more empathetic appreciation for one another. In short, at a time when we, as a nation, are becoming increasingly polarized, Fillman offers a powerful reminder of our common humanity, if only for a spell.
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Evan Reibsome is an assistant professor of American literature at Louisiana State University in Shreveport, where he teaches classes on the literature of war and peace. He is director of The Veterans Empathy Project.