Richard Burns. The Manager: a Poem.

Garrett, Daniel

London. Elliott & Thompson, 2001. 160 pages. 13.99. ISBN 1-904027-00-8

SOME PEOPLE THINK THAT POETRY and business do not mix, but Richard Burns complicates that notion in his long poem The Manager, a work divided in two parts and written in what the poet calls verse-paragraphs, with the emotional and narrative range of a novel. These verse-paragraphs focus on the life of an apparently successful business executive and his woman companion, with whom he has an open relationship allowing them both affairs--until she leaves him. This long poem includes events both dramatic and mundane, and its language use is by turn conversational, slangy, lyrical, philosophical, and even blandly professional to a satirical degree when it utilizes the business memo to express very personal sentiments. The mundane is usually considered dull, but it is what life mostly is, and yet important struggles and decisions shape the mundane: arguably, the nature of what will be made mundane--ordinary--is the very point of many important struggles.

The manager is the central focus of the poem. He is an intelligent man limited by the practicality of his life, but he is not the only focus of the poem. Through him we have a view of the contemporary world; and we see ambition, competition, free-floating angst and lust, and tawdry affairs (making sex seem like one of those things about which one says, I guess you had to be there). There are various social atmospheres, not only that of the office but also dinner parties, restaurants, and neighborhoods of different classes. Before the manager's lover decides to leave him, there's a wonderful revelation of love between them (isn't that always the way?): "Once in bed you said, Shall we be buried together. I don't want to die before / you. But couldn't bear life without you. / And another time you said: I'd like to curl up so tiny you could carry me in / your breastpocket. Where I'd sit safe and warm / listening to your heartbeats." Around the time she leaves, a friend of his also suffers romantic desertionwbut suffused with pain, he kills himself. The manager experiences a kind of grief and remorse, but this is also the opportunity for self-questioning, for facing his dishonesty and self-hatred. He then has moments of objectivity and generosity toward others. He realizes that life is inevitably about self-construction and being able to tell one's self a story about life that will give it a sense of purpose. There seems at least a brief turn toward the religious, with an apprehension of death. The man faces the tragic aspect of life--the facts of time, death, and the probable meaninglessness of human effort.

Writers often hope to bring readers closer to "the real," and this is something Burns does while (and by) exploring the resources of language, its many styles and tones. In The Manager one sees again that human contradiction is not a flaw as much as it is a fact. In it, we can see how the human mind experiments with propositions, testing ideas in different situations, moving toward what seems true. We resist the truths of others when they differ from ours. Sometimes we change our minds without changing our beliefs or our lives; other times we do actually change.

Daniel Garrett

Queens, New York