The Lamps of History, Michael Sandler

One of the things I like best about Michael Sandler’s volume of poems, The Lamps of History, is the way the images can take me almost entirely out of the poem–into imagining scenes from my own life–and then reel me back in, making me react to the rest of the experience as if it were from a life I knew something about. For instance, in “When Literature Made Something Happen,” I am invited to “sit… in a gilded czarist theater/where dusty chandeliers suggest a courtliness that crimson velvet,/masking an imperial crest above the stage, overrides.” That makes me think of the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires where I once sat awed in a chair that looked and felt like a throne, and that image makes me feel some of what a character in the poem must have felt as a young girl, in a “witness chair” with adults demanding that she tell them “what they talked about” until she finally “blurts/ Tolstoy.”

I remember being on the ocean around Maui when I read about how “our kayak barely yaws/ when a giant turtle breasts through cyan-green.”

None of the poems use image to ground me in experience better than “A Cubist Confronts Monday,” in which we get nostalgic images of going to work in the time before the pandemic, reflected back with sadness because many of us no longer see “planes of my face, groin, buttocks/slip into a ready slot, a tower’s/revolving door, showing my every side/ to mammon’s guards.”

Another thing I like about these poems is the slightly-amused-while-also-terribly-serious take on necromancy in “Impediments,” about a dead loved one and the still-living speaker’s urge to atone: “like you, I don’t admit/ the dead commune,/ although perhaps you’re still adept/ at penetrating gesture and look.”

Best of all, though, I like the poems about what it’s like to get old. “Bottle Cap” is one of my two favorites, with its final image of the cap sent flying “over the back fence/of childhood, when small/ seemed useful and the useless never/ nothing and nothing had gone flat.” And “Acer Saccharum” reminds me of something my father once said about not recognizing “that old man in the mirror” when he caught a glimpse first thing in the morning.

Acer Saccharum

This lofty tree guarding our northerly park
looks ready to turn. Splashes of leaves yellowing
at the edge, yet essentially green within,
the way some of us say we feel inside—
who doesn’t, shambling through duff, believe
they weren’t that different at 25,

that brittle arteries won’t run with sap
next March, or that the mind, though fibrous, isn’t
still as sharp, as the Latin word suggests
(the Romans made their spear shafts out of maple).

My buds, welts with a past, tighten their fists
for winter, quieting leaf-promises
of breath and rain grieved into sugared drips,
of one more honeyed ring in acrid flesh.

I received a copy of this volume from the author as part of a TLC Book Tour.

If you read these poems, I think that some of the images from The Lamps of History might stick with you for a while after you turn the last page.