Gary Grossman’s OBJECTS IN MIRROR MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR

Grossman, Professor Emeritus of Animal Ecology, Poet, Sculptor, is consistent. His poetry comes from a place where craft, pain, and laughter live next to the most surprising images and metaphors.

This is a collection comprising traditional free-verse and prose poems. Each and every one full of delicious lines, powerful, painful memories, a sense of wonder and unexpected turns.

Grossman’s work invites us to think of Camus' Absurdism. Camus held that when we laugh at sorrow or the absurdity of life, we assert our agency and humanity.

Grossman’s delightful, and often mischievous sense of humour wins the battle more often than not: In Cloacal Kiss (observing the birds): “Mating is a cloacal kiss / an uninspired and rapid / act of amour—white bread sex—”

No poem can be more brutal, powerful, and heartbreaking than Adolescence, a poem that forces the reader to bear witness to the unimaginable: Imagine this. “Imagine this, / Mom’s lying in the mess, uncapped / amber pill bottles lined up like soldiers / in a firing squad on her nightstand.”

Grossman the adult understands his troubled mother and he allows us to forgive her too. In Obituary: “[…] Sylvia / Siegel led a troubled life, perpetually trapped under the glass / ceiling that held women down until the twenty-first century, and / the lack of drugs for control of bipolarity, especially depression. / Almost there. Sylvia Siegel…”

In Grossman’s poetry one does a lot of reading ‘between the lines’ because his lines do that to the reader, and we get a sense of a strong and loving relationship with his wife, as though this love has been the healing for a man who had to overcome a traumatic youth, and this love, together with Grossman’s honesty and deep well of gentle laughter, made the poet who can write lines like these—from Bruised Old Apples: “[…]But fifty-four / years later, what remains are blurry mental / videos of her form, a sheer aqua nightgown / lying in puke and diarrhea—as if shot from / the last car of my bullet train of memory. // My wife says I’m less bruised than most old apples.”

Grossman, the man, the poet, the son, the husband, the scientist, the sculptor—the guy who’ll make you cry and laugh occasionally reminds me of Slyvia Plath, Wendy Cope, or Tony Harrison. Like those poets his work examines questions of identity, anxiety, sorrow, and pain that more often than not go hand-in-hand with a wry lightness.

The sculptor Grossman allows us the privilege of feeling the marble under his fingers in Torso: “My fingers dance over the slab / of Bardiglio, where a bulge calls for / stripping layers of finely grained, gray […]”

There is the delicacy of When the Spring Winds Are Strong, Wolf Spiders Balloon, then heartbreak again, and I begin to understand how trauma works, and how can one resist the allure of […] “Summer heat—a reluctant possum […]”, “when the sun pours / a pillar of March light”, or “Even in poetry, genius begins // as atoms no one else has cleaved.”

He also carries the Jewish history in his DNA. In Tante Sophie's Schnapps Glasses Grossman uses his aunt’s 19th century ‘thimbles’ to remind us of the time "of the 1890's when Cossacks sacked / Sophie’s town in the Pale of Settlement—” and sometimes tragedy, the lyrical, and his pixy-ish humor go hand-in-hand, for example when, in Recollections, Grandma says, “it’s shitteryne, a little this, / a little that, her English still / tethered to the Pale of Settlement.”

To sum up: Grossman gives you gentle laughs while your eyes fill with tears, he delicately pokes fun, and he tells you stories.