St. Louis native delivers staggering poetry debut

John Pleimann’s poems read like tree rings.

The St. Louis native’s work doesn’t necessarily show its age or plot a specific timeline. Rather, it bears witness to what a body can weather, how the shaping forces of love, isolation, doubt and death’s shadow etch themselves into the permanent record. 

Pleimann’s debut collection, “Come Shivering to Collect” (Slant Books), is a staggering and soulful document, testifying to experiences both profound and nearly imperceptible. The poet’s Missouri ties are tight and secure; Pleimann earned his master of fine arts degree at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and later taught at Jefferson College in Hillsboro. 

Falling third in the table of content, the title poem suitably sets the collection’s mood. Pleimann’s speaker encounters “a child with a full moon face” who “has come to collect for something / to which I must have agreed.” 

The young solicitor maintains a momentary vow of silence, leaving the speaker guessing about his obligations to the boy. Eventually the child walks away, leaving something rather than taking — an unexpected gift that undoes the speaker.

The scene Pleimann sets — “The moon tonight hangs bruised / and full, streetlights / flicker on” — establishes the book’s palette, an endless, inky black shot through with wounded whites and golds. The straining for connection between the boy and the speaker, and the unorthodox bond they share, repeats itself across the collection. The names and situations change; the longing and slight tilting of one’s internal axis recur. 

Death challenges Pleimann's narrators to a staring contest within more than one poem. "Head On" details a narrow escape, the homecoming of a drunk-driving father who, by all logic and chemistry, should have killed himself or someone else. The last lines of "AM" detail the phone call no one wants to take — and everyone answers at one time or another.

When your telephone rings at four in the morning,

you press the earpiece close and listen deep

to the split-second silence before some stranger asks

if you're who they think you are

and the quick, desperate breath when you say "Yes"

as if this time you mean it.

Many moments in the collection live within the disorientation of a broken relationship, the speaker's feet feeling around for any solid ground to stand upon. Loneliness pushes and pulls at the speaker of “In Your Feet,” who counts up the children he’ll never have and the god who’s always there. 

Other verses address the partner who left with a painfully authentic mixture of pity, repentance and resignation. 

Pleimann’s most dynamic work around connection — or the lack thereof — comes in a pair of poems set at a neighborhood Walgreens. “Brother, Can You?” calculates the difference and distance between the speaker and a man outside the store’s automatic doors “sifting for cigarette butts / to hold off hunger, to draw heat / into his chest.”

The gap closes the longer both men linger: “You want to say ‘Good God, man,’ / but you keep your comments / to yourself and on your way out / inhale his smoke like a spirit / you might someday need to call / to life.”

“For the Walgreens Christmas Eve Crew,” one of the book’s true flickering lights, calls a temporary truce with store staffers. Three hundred sixty-four days a year, their foibles frustrate the speaker. But it's Christmas Eve and he's newly single. Trying to find peace on Earth, he expresses a moment’s goodwill toward men:

It comforts me to know you, too, are stuck

inside fluorescent haze and hum,

while those you love go on without you.

Half-desperate to be redeemed, Pleimann's speakers try to save other creatures — and, thus, parts of their own souls. In "Stray," a man finds himself leaning all day long, his body bending toward the stray dog he encountered along the highway. 

The speaker stops in "On," gathering a "dazed and bloody possum" before heading into work to deliver a key presentation. Subsuming something of the animal's wildness, he makes the pitch "bloody paw prints skittered / up your shirt, your audience rapt, not sure / where you begin and the last two possum tracks, one / each side of your throat, end."

A certain musicality attends all Pleimann’s work — some strange, surprisingly winsome collision of Keith Jarrett’s meditative jazz and Elliott Smith’s wind-beaten dirges. But direct references to song elevate two pieces to the top of the collection. 

"Had Anyone Cared to Listen" carries the tune of a father who self-medicates to the sounds of classical music. "He was never in tune," Pleimann writes, "and had an odd counterpoint, / as if the music that played / was little more than prelude / to what he could have done / had anyone cared to listen." 

“Falsetto” finds a PBS viewer trying to rediscover the high notes during pledge-drive concert programming: “An operator is standing by to let you know / you still have it, but now it’s time / to give it up.” 

In both poems, the interval between glory and self-pity, a confident tune and a defeated dirge is only a quarter tone or so.

"Come Shivering to Collect" understands the squeeze of these spaces as Pleimann writes both with and against the grain, lending language to the moments which manifest rot and growth in our lives. 

adanielsen@columbiatribune.com

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