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Earthling, by Steve Healey. Coffee House Press. $14.00, paper

Review by J. E. Pitts

Steve Healey’s poems in his first book, Earthling, remind me of the work of Billy Collins. Some critics would peg that a bad thing, but I don’t think so. No other poet in our recent history has ignited the controversy that Mr. Collins has, and he’s done so by simply writing in the voice that Sandburg and Frost made popular. Why anyone would be against a poet who has made poetry popular again is beyond me, but Mr. Collins has raised hackles over the last few years for his successes, which have included best-selling books, packed houses for readings, and a two-year stint as the Poet Laureate of The United States.

There is a central reason, often overlooked, buried under this criticism: not everyone can write such seemingly simplistic poems that can speak to a universal core in almost every reader. In truth, few can. Some poets don’t feel too poetic unless they throw everything into a poem plus the kitchen sink-they cannot make the leap to try the simple, folksy way of writing poetry that Mr. Collins has mastered. He may have appropriated his style from the American grain-that easygoing way of letting the reader slip into a poem through clear, everyday language, but that’s the way the majority of America talks to one another. This is an obvious way to write poetry, and Mr. Collins can’t be faulted if he was the one who realized it first. He certainly didn’t come to the style late; his first collection, The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988) contains classic poems like ‘Walking Across The Atlantic” and “Winter Syntax” that can hold up with anything from his latest book.

Steve Healey shares that same sense of quick wit matched with deep soul that Mr. Collins holds. It’s not easy, but he shows that you can be both humorous and universal in a poem. Here is the opening of ‘henry david thoreau junior high school’:

You can blend with air.

You can blend around the pond

or math teacher’s mouth.

The scar on your arm can whisper

the answer, yes be the answer,

and all the girls named Dawn

(with the Lord still in your good ear).

Like a pine grove, you can hear

fingers be counted, let lunchtime

come forever with its baloney

and noonlight sandwich. But the bell

doesn’t ring, it’s quiet here

on Earth, and taste, only

the carameled valleys of your molars,

and smell, a house the size

of your smell.

Mr. Healey can also take what would seem to be a very small moment and make it into a large crashing crescendo. His work appears to be the poetry of the Everyday, but if you look closely, you see that there’s more churning under the surface, just like sharks glide quietly under whitecaps, waiting for the giddy surfers. Here’s the opening of ‘my debut’:

Standing in the backyard of my nation

I keep looking at my new shoes.

They’re like two small arks

saving my feet from the truth.

Perhaps it is only a pupil-colored bird

deciding how things will look.

The commas coming out of your eyelids,

you can toss them over your shoulder.

Say’s the cookie’s red fortune,

someone will visit you soon.

Water will creep into the backyard

and change the meaning of the arks.

Confession: I’m rehearsing things to say

to you, I’m tired of being scared.

Steve Healey doesn’t always succeed when he chooses a more pedestrian subject. We’ve all stood in the post office line, but do we really experience life-shifting epiphanies there? It’s doubtful. Most of us just want to mail our letters and avoid getting stuck behind the guy who needs to buy seven money orders. Mr. Healey makes up for a choice like that with sharp turns of phrase and an almost musical cadence. Here is the end of ‘standing in line at the post office’:

There’d been no movement for a very long time.

The new stamps were learning how to be loved.

I could’ve used a mountain-

I mean, the softest mirror, I was reaching for it.

Listen: the softest tidal wave.

The subject: coming and going.

“As poll numbers come in, rain goes away.”

I was standing in what people are saying about me lately.

The poems in Earthling are filled with interesting subplots. Poets love to take a central idea and send additional ideas spinning around it like buzzing atoms, but the reader can quickly grow confused and weary of this extra show. There is nothing harder for a reader to do than corral a poem that has gotten lost in tangents, but a major way to help present complicated work is to do so with simple language, as in this opening to ‘i do not know onesies’:

I do not know the small person

wearing my quilted outer person.

There is only one, and therefore

I cannot find the baby.

They say the baby is crawling

already, down the street,

but I have forgotten how to crawl.

Therefore, I know that an old person

has just taken a hard fall because

the world has grown fluffier.

It’s coming down fierce.

The crows are working hard to keep

the flake drapes sewn to the clouds.

When they say caw caw caw

it means black needles,

white thread, swoop.

The baby crawling down the snowy street

is about halfway to the fire station

and will not get there.

A sequence like that tells me that Steve Healey has a promising career ahead in poetry. Even if he swings for the fences and occasionally misses, he’s most certainly in the game, and whether he reminds readers of Billy Collins is, in the end, irrelevant: he has a unique voice, I think, and Earthling is a first book that pays rewards to the reader again and again.

VOX