Grotesque Singers by Rick Mullin

Imagery and narrative harmonize the song of a world facing epochal change in Grotesque Singers, a new poetry collection by Rick Mullin. Voices in the choir evoke those of Herman Melville, Modest Mussorgsky, David Lynch, and others just beyond the range of name retrieval. The book orchestrates this tumult of expression such that clarity may arise in a reading sensitive to the nature of personal and communal collapse, and the lifelong journey toward redemption.

Grotesque Singers is divided into four sections, three anchored by a sonnet crown—a narrative series of sonnets linked by the repetition of last and first lines of verses, with the last line of the last sonnet repeating the first line of the first, completing the circuit. While the form is nearly identical in each of the crowns, the three vary widely in tone and voicing, each establishing themes along the lines of Walpurgisnacht, Memento mori, Wrack, and Redemption.

There are other recognizable forms deployed in Grotesque Singers, including several poems written in Sapphic stanzas and four villanelles. A bespoke 15-line sonnet form, familiar to readers of the poet’s collections Transom and The Basilisk, appears throughout, along with blank- and free verse. Humor abounds, solemnity as well—another harmonization appropriate to the contemplation of plausible End Times and aspirational Next Times. Meanwhile a distinct feeling of “no time left” defines the constraint necessary for a paradoxical journey beyond limits.

Along the way, a reader will experience terrifying stage appearances, a gallery of gothic pictures, encounters with a tattooed outcast, and remembrances of a Beatle and a beloved Cold War-vintage toy.

Such a collection is bound to present an Ars poetica as well as an opinionated explication of ideas, especially old ideas. The contrasts between art and science that emerged in the 19th century resulting in oppositional camps in the 20th, for example, are revealed as artificial and deadly in “The Lost Boat”. The artificiality of human existence in a world now dominated by human-crafted technology runs like a thread through the poems, making several loops around the sonnet “Mr. Machine.”

But the novelty of old ideas frames a contemporary human dilemma in these poems. Likewise, a liberating return to much of what has been thrown off offers hope on a journey to redemption. Statements of the poet’s dying mother recounting morning dreams—her wish for the world at manageable scale—speak to a new vision at the dying of the light. The consciousness of a lost, eternal chord in “The Obscure” reminds us that there is something like ineffable intelligence that cannot be doused by the artificial.

Meanwhile, there are the depictions of all-too-effable hardships and dilemmas in poems such as “Firings,” “Tattoo Man,” and “After All.” The evocation of loss and lament in these poems is met with a demand in “Fortinbras” that the lost spirit assert itself and speak for the world in its decline.

Grotesque Singers as a whole suggests a crown, an-end-at-the-beginning, an orbit around a planet that is itself turning. Chaos of the world is here, comprising memorable images a reader might arrange to realize an integral vision, one that may well culminate in the collection’s closing picture of an old man, his lame dog and the pair of hawks circling toward a burning oblivion overhead.

In the sarcophagal words of the profane tenor Jackie Gleason, “And away we go.”