In “Of Modern Poetry,” Wallace Stevens writes, “It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. / It has to face the men of the time and to meet / The women of the time.  It has to think about war / And it has to find what will suffice” (240).  Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life, her third and most accessible collection, meets all of these criteria.  Combining the languages of the modern world—the languages of news, officialdom, technology, and games—with her revitalizing sensibility, the collection explores themes such as fear, isolation, love, identity, and escape (though the poems themselves are not escapist) and attempts to find a way to live in what often seems like an artificial world in a time of crisis.

            Consisting of seven sections in all, Modern Life begins with a suite of five prose poems. The first sentence of “Implications for Modern Life” opens a trapdoor into the collection: “The ham flowers have veins and are rimmed in rind, each petal a little meat sunset” (3).  Uniting the plant world with the animal world, the beautiful with the grotesque, and the cruel with the tender, “ham flowers” are the first of many grafts in the book.  The sentence also offers a taste of the alliteration that proliferates throughout the poems, and it introduces us to the declarative voice that delivers us into the them.  In the next sentence, the speaker “den(ies) all connection with the ham flowers” (3), which is a common reaction to the events of our time.  However, later in the poem, the speaker encounters “a horse lying on the side of the road and think(s) You are sleeping, you are sleeping, I will make you be sleeping” (3).  Confronted with this horse, the speaker wonders, “But if I didn’t make the ham flowers, how can I make him get up?” (3).  The scenario forces us to acknowledge the fact that we cannot deny our part in the world’s problems and simultaneously hope to solve them.  Declaring “I made the ham flowers” (3), the speaker resuscitates the horse and earns readers’ trust.  She promises, “If you stay, I will find you fresh hay” (3).

            “How We Learned to Hold Hands,” the next poem in the collection, gives us several grafted creatures, including the “catgoat” (4).  Several reviewers have noted Harvey’s fascination with hybrids[1], but no one has seen the hybrids as embodiments of the desire to simultaneously be apart from the world and a part of the world.  At the end of “How We Learned to Hold Hands,” Harvey writes, “When the sun hit at a certain angle, the battle would begin—cat wanting to see its cat reflection, goat wanting to see goat” (4).  “We” made the catgoat “because we could” (4), and their “Keepers…favored covered wagons with billowing sheets tucked in at the edges, puckering like a healing wound.  They tied scarves tightly around their chins—men and women—as if to hold the hemispheres of their own heads together” (4).  Splicing animals becomes an emblem of the human desire to connect coupled with the human fear of being hurt; not brave enough to take risks with other human beings, we carry out experiments on animals, projecting human qualities onto them.  Harvey expresses the wish to erase divisions again at the end of “The Golden Age of Figureheads” when the “we” in the poem becomes “like the earth before the equator was invented, like the giant tenor who unbuckles his belt and lets out his one truest note” (5). 

Later in the first section, Harvey shows us a centaur meditating on “a funny little fraction” (7), created by “(t)he bird on the gate and the goat nosing the grass below” (7), and wondering “if this thought is more human than horse, more poetry than prose” (7).  Then the centaur sees a river “so clogged with mermaids and mermen, there’s no room for fish” (7) and watches “a group of extremist griffins, intent of their graffiti—Long Live the Berlin…” (7).  The centaur completes the griffins’ statement by spelling “Wall” on his napkin and sketching a girl next to it “getting sawed in half” (7).  Unlike the “we” in “How We Learned to Hold Hands,” the centaur and griffins desire separation.  One suspects that if they achieved their goal, they would soon want to be rejoined with something else.

In the collection’s penultimate poem, Harvey conducts an experiment with fusion and fission on language itself.  The speaker plants a strawberry plant in the middle of an abandoned drawbridge in Delaware and covers it with a bell jar (80).  While waiting for the plant to produce a strawberry, she sits in the control box and “polish(es) the controls” (80).  When the plant finally yields a strawberry that is “good and red and round,” the speaker listens to “Stuck in the Middle with You” and opens the drawbridge, an action that generates two new words: “Strawbridge” and “Drawberry” (81).  This apparently absurd experiment reveals the deeper truth, one of the central truths of the collection, that language has the power to isolate or individualize us, producing the subjectivity that Robo-Boy seeks in “Moving Day” (45), and the power to connect us as it does in “Terror of the Future / 9,” when the speaker is “just glad you (are) speaking to (her)” (69).  At the end of that poem, the end of “you” means “the end of me too” (69), which suggests that connection is a necessary part of individualization—a connection that we most often form through the medium of language.

The two series “The Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future” have garnered more attention than the other sections of the book.  In his review of Modern Life, David Orr writes:

But what makes “Modern Life” more than just another neatly accomplished collection from a neatly accomplished poet are two long, strange, nervous sequences: “The Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future.” These are among the most arresting poems yet written about the current American political atmosphere, and they’re all the more surprising coming from a writer whose sensibility seems so resistant to our usual ideas about “political poetry.” But then, our usual ideas are often not our best ones.[2]

Several critics have also commented on the form of the series, which Harvey describes in a note at the end of the collection as “not strict abecedarian poems because they are not acrostics, but they do mimic the abecedarius’s alphabetical footsteps” (85).  As Harvey also notes, “the words ‘future’ and ‘terror’ act like ‘A’ and ‘B’—they were the markers that mattered” (85).  “The Future of Terror” progresses from “g” to “s,” and “Terror of the Future” works backwards from “s” to “g.”  Joan Houlihan, among others, derisively comments on the style of the poems in the series, claiming that they contain “line stacks” and are basically childish.[3]

            It seems to me that Harvey has simply learned the speech of the place.  The series employ the languages of the official report, the newscast, and games, looping them through the loosely abecedarian forms.  I find this looping particularly effective.  It recalls electronic music in which the disc jockey finds the break in a song and loops it; in hip-hop, an emcee raps over this looped beat.  Harvey’s looping technique also recalls the headlines scrolling across the bottom of the screen on CNN.  Indeed, Harvey’s poems accurately render the vividness and the vagueness of a news report.  In this way, these are Harvey’s most mimetic poems to date.  In “The Future of Terror / 1,” she writes:

                        We had made the big time,

                        but night still nipped at our heels.

                        The navigator’s needle swung strangely,

                        oscillating between the oilwells

                        and ask again later.  We tried to pull ourselves

                        together by practicing quarterback sneaks

                        along the pylons, but the race to the ravine

                        was starting to feel as real as the R. I. P.’s

                        and roses carved in rock.  Suddenly the sight

                        of a schoolbag could send us scrambling.

The actions of the poem are clear, but the context is not.  The actions seem separated as headlines are separated, and, in a world inundated with media, it seems that our thought processes start to mimic those media.  In “The Future of Terror /  11,” the speaker confesses, “I accidentally shot the generator / which would have been hard to gloss over / in a report except we weren’t writing reports anymore” (22).  Later in the poem, she says, “Here was my hypothesis: we were inextricably / fucked” (22).  We might not be writing reports anymore, but we still speak the language of the report.  At the end of “The Future of Terror / 4,” the speaker flatly states, “What was there left to say? / We turned on the teleprompter” (15).  Harvey’s use of this language, however, is not an endorsement of the language.  Rather, her poems expose the artificiality of the language and encourage readers to question it.

            The “Terror of the Future” series uses the same form and language, but, as David Orr notes, the “you” becomes more prominent, so the poems read like post-apocalyptic love poems.  The speaker of “Terror of the Future / 5” tells us, “The radio said we needed to repeople” (65), then says, “The odds on you / loving me were a thousand to one, but there you were: / nibbling my toes in your nightshirt, / kissing me on the mouth in the mudroom” (65).  In “Terror of the Future / 6,” the speaker contemplates going to “the sponging house / by the shore” (66).  She says, “I thought that might be an idea / for you and me, but you, who hated a parade / and loved a recession, wanted to watch the tide go out / without us” (66).  In a line from “Terror of the Future / 9,” the speaker incorporates the language of the headline into the narrative of her love affair: “Of course, / given the state of the ozone, we weren’t / going anywhere” (69).  In the last poem of the series, we learn that “(i)t’s not a matter of life and death, it’s life or / death” (70).  At the end of the poem, the speaker asks a historian to “(h)elp me with ‘or’” (70), which suggests that the speaker prefers “and.”  That is, she prefers a narrative of union and connection.

Much of the two series is written in past tense.  Notable exceptions include the last line of “The Future of Terror / 11”: “So this is how you live in the present” (22); and the last poem in the “Terror of the Future” series, in which the speaker despairs, “O there’s no way to nectarize this moment— / it’s entirely without sweetness” (70).  It is also interesting that the first poem of the book’s final section takes us all the way back to “The Invention of Love”: “The cave woman and cave man lie side by side, each head filled with bright images the other can’t see.  Even when they press their ears or mouths or noses together, the skull wall is still in the way” (73).  Later, “They bump globes sadly” (73), so the people of the futuristic poems and the cave people share the same problem: loneliness.  It seems that Harvey has been writing about a future that has already happened, a now that is little more than the point at which the past was grafted to the future.  But a now that has its own language, a language that must be perpetually found.

            Modern Life does us the favor of showing us that human needs have not changed as much as we sometimes imagine and that our problems are not as unique as they sometimes seem.  The collection also exposes the absurdity of our attempts to solve human problems by becoming less than, or other than, human.  Harvey’s fabulist style is particularly well-suited to accomplish this task.  The poems serve as a record of our times and restore our humanity, helping us to find what will suffice.