Foreseeable Futures
BY William Matthews
(Houghton Mifflin, 1987)

In Foreseebale Futures, the language becomes more clipped, the speed at which a wide range of references and compensations emerge becomes faster, and the apparent discrepancy between surface speech and what Bakhtin calls inner speech becomes greater. “Caddie’s day, the Country Club, a Small Town in Ohio,” for instance, opens with a description of the Mondays when caddies played for free until the poem suddenly yet matter-of-factly announces — “That’s any Monday but / the one Bruce Ransome came up / from the bottom of the pool / like a negative rising in a tank.” The image, though justly accurate, emphasizes the unreality of the scene, and almost seems inappropriate. A little later, the speaker says:

What the reference to the naive and always puzzled Babar does is at once diminishing the realm of death, consigning it to an item in a child’s book, and reminding us, by its bizarre inappropriateness of our lack of understanding: “Our ignorance lay all around us / like a landscape, ” he says. As the poem develops, it is only luck, as in the seemingly random references, that explains death, revealing how much we wish to avoid its presence. The poem ends:

Memory, finally, must pass things on, like luck, which is not at all to pass on feeling. The reference to “death-rinsed Bruce” at first seems callous, but in these last few lines the insistent detail about death, the use of parallelisms and suspensions culminating in one sentence, the direct address to the reader, and the fact of recalling the death once again, all intensify the feeling, deny what they want to say on the surface. Death rises anyway, like the negative, awkward, inappropriate, always premature, always as wrongly present as our words for it. And this, in a paradoxical way, makes the style impressively appropriate.

The question of style as we have been exploring it turns eventually into a question of “Aesthetic Distance,” as Matthews suggests in a poem by that title. The poet in the poem writes only to his craft while outside the poem he is writing, various tragedies occur. Yet the narrator of the poem is aware of this double perspective. In fact, he draws the reader in as a “you” who undercuts aesthetic distance by his intimacy with the poem’s problems and underscores distance by his ironic overview. The poem opens with the poet writing, as we learn:

In a way, the poet’s situation is reflected by the narrator’s as the narrator goes on rather coolly analyzing all the ironies available, including what the mothers of the dead might do. But at least the narrator is conscious of the situation: “Our mother is drinking / mediocre sherry and we’re making fine distinctions.” As it turns out, the poet’s and narrator’s concerns about style, transforming and changing words, has a great deal to do with what goes on in the outside world:

The poem ends with the several strands not tied together but rather arranged in a sort of parallel structure: