Poetry review – BLOOD IS BLACK IN THE SHADOWS: Charles Rammelkamp finds unexpected pleasures amid the bleakness of Dennis Gulling’s poetic vignettes
Blood Is Black in the Shadows
Dennis Gulling
Cosmic Monolith, 2024
ISBN: 979-8327825857
46 pages $8.00
The best part of Dennis Gulling’s riveting new collection of noir poetry? His bio note! No eye-glazing list of previous publications or a mind-numbing enumeration of Pushcart and Best-of-Net nominations. No, instead he claims to be ‘inventor of the disposable camera, former ambassador to Norway, Tony-Award-winner for his role as Flying Monkey #3 in Wicked.’ All untrue! But what an imagination and what a subversive sense of humor!
This sly, ironic humor is likewise at work in some of his grimmest poems about robberies gone wrong, misplaced love, impulsive decisions, and sheer dumb luck. Take the poem “Love Story,” a title that reeks of sincerity on the face of it. Not so much.
She dug the bullet
From his shoulder
With a paring knife
While her sisters held him down
When the cops came
Looking for him she
Hid him in the coal cellar until
They went away
A week later
She married him with
His arm in a sling
And a stolen ring
On her finger
This is certainly not “funny,” but it does produce a kind of wry smile nevertheless. True love indeed. Such devotion.
Many of Gulling’s poems are little vignettes about characters with names – Palmeri, Gorman, Mason, Lyford, Portman, Tangman, “One-arm Davey” and others – people the reader briefly gets to know before Gulling spells out their grim fates. In “Holdup at Elm Street Tap,” Tangman is a bartender who gets into a gunfight with two would-be robbers – Briggs and Palmeri. This Palmeri may or may not be the same as the Palmeri in “Punching In” who stands at the time clock ready to put in another dreary eight hours at the factory when he impulsively mutters, ‘Fuck this company / Fuck this town / Fuck this life’ and flees to some undetermined destiny. But it’s probably a different Palmeri. The first one, the would-be holdup man at the Elm Street Tap, winds up ‘gutshot and / Trailing blood / As he crawled on his hands and knees / Toward the door / Crying like a baby….’
In “Exit,” Stevie Whitmer gets the last laugh when he puts a bullet through his skull in the bathroom of Tucker’s Bar. Tucker had stolen Stevie’s girlfriend, and this was Stevie’s way of “getting even.” On top of it, Tucker breaks his arm slipping in Stevie’s blood when he goes to investigate. Take that, Tucker!
The unnamed protagonist of “Jumper” is another character with a broken heart. He leaps to his death whispering a woman’s name, unloved by his family, ‘a joke to the rest of the world.’ Mason is the protagonist of the next poem – entitled “Mason ” – seated at his desk when, in a similar scenario, he sees a body fall past outside his window. Mason runs down the six flights of stairs to the street to find the body, a gun in its hand and a smile on its face. The last line of the poem, Mason’s reaction, sums it all up: ‘What the fuck?’
Love certainly sends many a character around the bend in these poems. In “Over Breakfast” a man tells a woman he’s mad about her. To “prove“ it, he slices his hand with a butcher knife. She in turn giggles, grabs his wrist, sticks her tongue into the gash, ‘to taste his madness.’ In “Breakup,” when a man pulls over to the side of the road to urinate, the woman he’s with slides over into the driver’s seat and tears away, leaving the man behind in a compromised position in the middle of nowhere! In “Lazy Boy,” Corgan is sitting in his recliner watching the Cubs on television when his wife Francine comes up behind him and buries a hatchet in the top of his head. Cars, guns, and sharp tools figure into so many married couples’ lives (and deaths) in Blood Is Black in the Shadows. A plumber’s wrench to the back of the skull is payback to Munson, the protagonist of “Sharks,” but that’s all in the spirit of business, not love. Perhaps no poem captures the obsession of love as powerfully as “Wolf.”
There’s a darkness
My skin can’t contain
Where every memory of you
Wanders the landscape
Like a wolf
That hasn’t eaten in days
And its hunger is a ghost
That chases the light away
So many of these tormented characters feel the wolf’s hunger vis-a-vis their lovers.
Except for the occasional question mark, Dennis Gulling does not bother with punctuation. But then again the vivid images don’t require that kind of stage direction. We’ve already seen this in “Love Story,” but take this portion from “Cactus Cafe,” in which a man and a woman muse about their future at a roadside diner in the desert, to underscore the point:
We’d go our separate ways after this
She back home to Arkansas
Me somewhere on the coast
We’d run loose
But would never be free
Always waiting for someone
To come for us
We looked at each other with dead eyes
But said nothing
You might want to toss in a couple of commas or a dash here or there or sprinkle a period or two, but the sheer bleak future these two face is already crystal clear enough. So it goes throughout Blood Is Black in the Shadows, a thoroughly engrossing collection of noir poems. Not bad for a flying monkey, eh?
Nov 6 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Dennis Gulling
Poetry review – BLOOD IS BLACK IN THE SHADOWS: Charles Rammelkamp finds unexpected pleasures amid the bleakness of Dennis Gulling’s poetic vignettes
The best part of Dennis Gulling’s riveting new collection of noir poetry? His bio note! No eye-glazing list of previous publications or a mind-numbing enumeration of Pushcart and Best-of-Net nominations. No, instead he claims to be ‘inventor of the disposable camera, former ambassador to Norway, Tony-Award-winner for his role as Flying Monkey #3 in Wicked.’ All untrue! But what an imagination and what a subversive sense of humor!
This sly, ironic humor is likewise at work in some of his grimmest poems about robberies gone wrong, misplaced love, impulsive decisions, and sheer dumb luck. Take the poem “Love Story,” a title that reeks of sincerity on the face of it. Not so much.
She dug the bullet From his shoulder With a paring knife While her sisters held him down When the cops came Looking for him she Hid him in the coal cellar until They went away A week later She married him with His arm in a sling And a stolen ring On her fingerThis is certainly not “funny,” but it does produce a kind of wry smile nevertheless. True love indeed. Such devotion.
Many of Gulling’s poems are little vignettes about characters with names – Palmeri, Gorman, Mason, Lyford, Portman, Tangman, “One-arm Davey” and others – people the reader briefly gets to know before Gulling spells out their grim fates. In “Holdup at Elm Street Tap,” Tangman is a bartender who gets into a gunfight with two would-be robbers – Briggs and Palmeri. This Palmeri may or may not be the same as the Palmeri in “Punching In” who stands at the time clock ready to put in another dreary eight hours at the factory when he impulsively mutters, ‘Fuck this company / Fuck this town / Fuck this life’ and flees to some undetermined destiny. But it’s probably a different Palmeri. The first one, the would-be holdup man at the Elm Street Tap, winds up ‘gutshot and / Trailing blood / As he crawled on his hands and knees / Toward the door / Crying like a baby….’
In “Exit,” Stevie Whitmer gets the last laugh when he puts a bullet through his skull in the bathroom of Tucker’s Bar. Tucker had stolen Stevie’s girlfriend, and this was Stevie’s way of “getting even.” On top of it, Tucker breaks his arm slipping in Stevie’s blood when he goes to investigate. Take that, Tucker!
The unnamed protagonist of “Jumper” is another character with a broken heart. He leaps to his death whispering a woman’s name, unloved by his family, ‘a joke to the rest of the world.’ Mason is the protagonist of the next poem – entitled “Mason ” – seated at his desk when, in a similar scenario, he sees a body fall past outside his window. Mason runs down the six flights of stairs to the street to find the body, a gun in its hand and a smile on its face. The last line of the poem, Mason’s reaction, sums it all up: ‘What the fuck?’
Love certainly sends many a character around the bend in these poems. In “Over Breakfast” a man tells a woman he’s mad about her. To “prove“ it, he slices his hand with a butcher knife. She in turn giggles, grabs his wrist, sticks her tongue into the gash, ‘to taste his madness.’ In “Breakup,” when a man pulls over to the side of the road to urinate, the woman he’s with slides over into the driver’s seat and tears away, leaving the man behind in a compromised position in the middle of nowhere! In “Lazy Boy,” Corgan is sitting in his recliner watching the Cubs on television when his wife Francine comes up behind him and buries a hatchet in the top of his head. Cars, guns, and sharp tools figure into so many married couples’ lives (and deaths) in Blood Is Black in the Shadows. A plumber’s wrench to the back of the skull is payback to Munson, the protagonist of “Sharks,” but that’s all in the spirit of business, not love. Perhaps no poem captures the obsession of love as powerfully as “Wolf.”
There’s a darkness My skin can’t contain Where every memory of you Wanders the landscape Like a wolf That hasn’t eaten in days And its hunger is a ghost That chases the light awaySo many of these tormented characters feel the wolf’s hunger vis-a-vis their lovers.
Except for the occasional question mark, Dennis Gulling does not bother with punctuation. But then again the vivid images don’t require that kind of stage direction. We’ve already seen this in “Love Story,” but take this portion from “Cactus Cafe,” in which a man and a woman muse about their future at a roadside diner in the desert, to underscore the point:
We’d go our separate ways after this She back home to Arkansas Me somewhere on the coast We’d run loose But would never be free Always waiting for someone To come for us We looked at each other with dead eyes But said nothingYou might want to toss in a couple of commas or a dash here or there or sprinkle a period or two, but the sheer bleak future these two face is already crystal clear enough. So it goes throughout Blood Is Black in the Shadows, a thoroughly engrossing collection of noir poems. Not bad for a flying monkey, eh?