And The Stones Come Tumbling Down
Review of Brandon Courtney’s This, Sisyphus (USA: YesYes Books, 2019)
By Cheng Him
The Sisyphus of ancient legend was a man so dishonest he was cursed by the gods to an eternity of rolling boulders up a slope. In some way, This, Sisyphus embodies that burden—namely one of futile struggle. The third book of Brandon Courtney, This, Sisyphus is a collection of elegies, whose narrative orbits around the untimely demise of the author’s best friend and lover. Both Courtney and his lover Ben were sailors, the former a US navy veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom. One wonders if the poet’s time in the military affected the way the collection was realized—veterans inhabit a world often inscrutable to those who have not served, one that is monumental in its grief, and utterly lonesome for those left in it.
As a collection, This, Sisyphus is split into four sections. The first contains poems that deal with the immediate aftermath of Ben’s death—the recovery of his body and its return to the States. The later sections provide glimpses of the years after, as Brandon alternates between addressing Ben and God, trying to ascribe greater meaning or purpose to death. As the title suggests, the speaker’s efforts are Sisyphean in nature, though the form of the elegy is pushed to its limits in the process.
This, Sisyphus begins in media res with a poem titled “Comfort for A Hollow Point,” an elegy that opens with the image of Ben drowning. Though it begins with this event, the poem turns towards the metaphysical in its second half:
Courtney describes the drowning of Ben as a metaphysical transformation—turning from a person into “a hollow point / flowering there.” Presumably, “there” in that phrase is a place for paradise, out of the poet’s grasp.
The poem’s title is worthy of note. “Hollow Point,” for those unfamiliar with firearms, is a projectile round designed to expand, or in this case, unfurl as a flower does. It causes a painful death for whoever is struck by the round, as the hollow point bullet unfurls within the body, its razored petals sawing into flesh. Its use as a metaphor for grief highlights the poet’s connection to the military and how trauma sustained during service stays lodged in the body for years afterwards.
And so the poem lays the groundwork for the rest of the collection: grief is a physical sensation, difficult, even futile to remove.
Consider the start of the following poem, “Psychopomp”, which comes just two poems after “Hollow Point”, in which Courtney laments Ben’s death by again alluding to Greek mythology:
Courtney describes the recovery of a body, presumably Ben’s, from the sea days after he has drowned. Psychopomp ferries the souls of the dead to the afterlife, but in Courtney’s case he is ferrying the body of the dead home. Doing so is haunting, as Ben’s presence continually returns as an “exit wound […] empty as a gun barrel.”
When reading this poem, I linger on the words “drowned/ myself awake.” The action, to me at least, is inseparable from the earlier description of the speaker’s mouth covered by sheets. It bears a striking resemblance to waterboarding—a method of torture used by the United States in its Middle Eastern campaigns. Designed to replicate the sensation of drowning, waterboarding triggers the gag reflex. Its inclusion suggests that the act of ferrying one’s beloved home is a form of divine punishment akin to torture. Courtney’s use of mythological imagery remains largely restricted to the titles of his poems. They overlay Courtney’s elegies, suggesting that Courtney’s grief is larger than life. That myth is an appropriate register for his emotions to come through.
Overt references to the military continues through the rest of the collection. I would suggest that Courtney’s time in the navy has influenced not only his imagery but even the forms of his poems. Consider the following poem:
Like many of Courtney’s other poems, “Comfort for Intrusive Thoughts” employs cadence and internal rhyme masterfully. It sets a beat not dissimilar to the rolling of ocean waves, with the pitch of the reader’s voice rising and falling as it winds its way through the poem. Even the very shape of the poem is evocative of a wave, as most of the other poems are.
The poem’s loose assemblage of rhymes, its deconstructed lines, underlines Courtney’s intent. By eschewing an overly formal structure while still retaining its trappings, it reminds me of the way veterans often describe their experiences post-discharge from the armed forces. There is the overused quip: you can take the man out of the army, but not the army out of the man. Bearing that in mind, the wave-like rhythm and structure highlights how the grief of losing a comrade, or a loved one, stays with those who leave the service. Often it comes back to them, waxing and waning in intensity. In the face of grief that defies chronology, what else is a veteran to do, but to lend their inclination towards discipline to order their thoughts on such a weighty matter?
The last two sections of This, Sisyphus each contain one extended poetic sequence. These poems, dispensing with the neatness of short poems, are sprawling acts of myth-making. In “Keel,” Courtney mythologizes Ben’s body as it is embalmed and then buried after the funeral. He also recounts the months after (“Was I ever this alive,/ searching for you in a cluster/ of pearls, sunspots, the ebb/ of white horses hoof ruts?”) If death makes memories of the departed, then myths revitalize them. Myths in Courtney’s collection are utilized as a means to rework the past, so as to give them greater meaning.
Consider the final poem of the collection, “Hexaemera.” Traditionally a form that engages with the myth of creation, Courtney’s rendition of a hexaemeral poem engages with the overall theme of the collection—that the world has come undone with grief, so much so that creation itself must be invoked to explain the scale that the trauma reaches. In a way, “Hexaemera” could be surmised to be Courtney’s attempt to reconcile with the uncaring god that has inflicted the burden of trauma on him:
once more into the night. Here I am
left to question whether I is just
an ancestral name that circumscribes me—
a thing—that rides its end and disappears
into this earth, unready as it came, where
all good things are changed by pain.
Quoted above, the final lines of “Hexaemera” calls to mind Courtney’s rationalization of the grievous state of his existence at the start of the collection, of the burden of his service and subsequent trauma, the myth of Sisyphus, so to speak.
This, Sisyphus feels to me to be a beautiful collection, but also one that speaks particularly to those who have served. It helps readers understand what veterans often cannot articulate. However, naming what cannot be easily named brings no relief. It is, in fact, the first step to rolling the stone back up the hill from whence it came.
Cheng Him is from Singapore. Their work has been featured in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS), The Kindling, Tiger Moth Review, among many others. They are part of the writing group known as the ATOM Collective.
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