Enjoy
Oblivion was originally
slotted to be published by Rusty Truck Press and later Concrete Meat Press but
due to extensive delays, Carstens decided to publish the book in an expanded
edition through his own publishing company, Epic Rites Press. This collection
consists of 33 poems, up from the original 17. Carstens’ long-time
collaborator, Janne Karlsson, the Swedish artist, provides 14 full-page complimentary illustrations.
Most of the newly added material to the collection
comprise the first 11 poems. These poems are united in Carstens’ favourite
topic: death. Death is just around the corner but people like ‘Danny’ think
they are “invincible” or like John Ritter in ‘despite’, money & fame will
never be able to save you when “your number is up.”
In ‘we’ Carstens pays a tribute to Joseph
Conrad who once brilliantly wrote that the sum total of human endeavour could
be written on a cigarette paper: “We are born. We suffer. We die.” Although
Carstens sees life as “essentially meaningless” he ends the poem with a dirge
of hope:
birthdays
and funerals
are
inconsequential.
what
is in between
should be
celebrated.
Also notable is the poem ‘today’ in which the
speaker, presumably Carstens, contemplates “the hour” of his end. He wonders
whether our lives “were more/ than meat/ and bone.”
The remainder of the collection are essentially
poems of hate towards Carstens’ father.
Many are directly addressed to the old man who messed around with other
women & fucked off when Carstens was a young boy. This part of the
collection telescopes Carstens’ thoughts from when he first heard his father
was dying, to his eventual death & later his various bitter reflections on
his passing. Carstens grieves intensely but not for the old man, but rather for
the relationship with his dad he never had & for the grief his father had inflicted
on his family.
‘I just heard’ sets a caustic tone for this
section. The speaker discovers that his father is on his death-bed and is
asking for him. The old bastard “has nobody” else and is belatedly trying to
reconcile with his son to perhaps relieve his guilt before he dies. Carstens,
understandably, cannot forgive his father for being abandoned as a child &
is totally contemptuous of him. All he can utter is a trite, dismissive:
“Goodbye Dad.”
In ‘if you go’ someone
warns the speaker that his father’s body is so swollen that he ‘probably/ won’t
recognise him.’ He tersely adds, “I hardly/ remember/ what he/ looked like/
before.”
In one of the stronger
poems in the collection ‘you never’, the speaker furthers this idea of
estrangement in a simple but deeply personal way by directly speaking to his
deceased father. Carstens expresses how damaged he is inside and how his
father’s own acts of irresponsibility have also had unseen consequences in the
upbringing of his own family:
you
never
taught me
how to shoot a puck,
talk to girls,
make friends,
handle peer pressure,
or fight
you never once
helped me
with my homework.
the only lesson
you ever taught me
was accidental.
by
your
example
i learned
how not
to be
a
father.
(The poem has been published with the
permission of the author)
Karlsson’s subdued, simple caricatures in this
collection often represent Carstens as a lonely child staring blankly at a ball
or puck. Others show the old man pissed-off, guzzling beer, or as in the
illustration for the poem ‘I was’, he indifferently kicks the boy’s soccer ball
away as he cuddles his girlfriend, Wolf & his mother look on from the distance.
Karlsson’s drawings are unique & add a curious layer of existential ennui
to Carstens’ work.
The latter part of the collection reveals
Carstens’ response to the news that his father has died. In ‘driving home’ when
he learns of his father’s death, he sees a rat in the street and scathingly
says to him, “it/reminded/ me/ of/ you.” In the title poem ‘no’ the poet writes
contently that his father has not been given a funeral nor a burial plot and
has been justly banished from the family forever:
no
obituary.
no
funeral.
no
cemetery plot.
only
vanishing
and
absence.
just
how you
honored
Mom.
enjoy
oblivion,
Dad.
In Carstens’ world, less
is certainly more and the longer he writes, the more savagely he pares back his
language to the bone. In his deceptively simple use of language in ENJOY OBLIVION, he shares with us a huge
range of intense human emotions which have impacted upon him as a young child:
hatred, regret, grief, rage.
Yet his parting shot in
‘death’ the last poem in the collection is again a positive one. Despite it’s
brevity:
life
sure was
fun
while it
lasted,
wasn’t it?
Buy ENJOY OBLIVION here: http://www.wolfgangcarstens.com/enjoy-oblivion.html
