rev. of Tipping Point by Fred Marchant

Tipping Point 
Poems by Fred Marchant. The Word Works, $10.00 paper. Reviewed by Sam Cornish.

Fred Marchant’s first collection of poetry is autobiographical, yet intellectual and poetic enough to avoid the clichés of confessional poetry. There is honest emotion when he writes of his father

abusing his mother, or of the same man dying of prostate cancer: “the home of maleness, / the fountain of youth, the spring of come, / the walnut, however / you want it, has, in my father’s own words, / ‘turned bad.’ ” Marchant is able to write about his father’s anger and suffering with both immediacy and distance, and an emotional clarity emerges in these poems, as well as in those about the body and the poet’s own aging, his youth, and his service in Vietnam, where he was a lieutenant in the Marine Corps (he was later honorably discharged as a conscientious objector).

Tipping Point is about a whole life without self-pity. Rather, it is about a life of compassion. A family is revealed in profoundly moral and realistic terms by a son who writes about them as common people, living as best they can: “Now the wind sounds out clearly / and says this is the mountain / of forgiveness, and that the work / will be to traverse the empty spaces / with meaning.”

Tipping Point is clearly one of the best first books of poetry to come out in some time — a moving reflection of a society and generation that came of age during the Vietnam War and of a white American male writer’s odyssey, which is anything but self-serving in its relentless, brutal honesty.

Sam Cornish’s most recent book of poetry is Folks Like Me, published by Zoland Books. He is also the author of 1935: A Memoir, published by Ploughshares Books.