Poems, Prayers, and Promises: A Review of Phil Goldstein’s “How to Bury a Boy at Sea”
By Seth Lewis
Featured art: “Peace” by JMW Turner
This past year, I found myself regularly discussing loss and change with my therapist. I was freshly estranged from my family, struggling to decide which PhD program to matriculate at, and questioning why I chose a career in writing. One day as we shuttled between these topics our conversation casually veered into poetry as I brought up H.D.’s poem “The Flowering of the Rod.” I intoned her words like they were my own: “In resurrection, there is confusion.” I couldn’t grasp why things were unfolding how they were; I felt powerless, unable to control things happening around me. I wanted answers. I needed them. I was searching for stability. And just as the speaker of H.D.’s poem, my therapist helped me to find resolution amidst uncertainty: “Yet resurrection is a sense of direction.”
I know it sounds strange — to go to therapy and to use someone else’s words to describe my individual experiences. But for many of us, poetry is our way of making sense of the world. It provides us a language to articulate our feelings and a vocabulary to enact our healing. Poetry, Jacquelyn Ardam explains, “has long been the space for those on many kinds of peripheries to encounter our individual and political selves.” These moments of contact offer us unfettered access to who we are and who we can become. And more than simply introducing us to ourselves, the act of reading poetry urges us to find community in our hardships — a moment James Baldwin describes as “a fantastic and terrifying liberation.”
Baldwin emphasizes the possibility of communal healing by asking us to consider our hardships as integrating rather than isolating:
“Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less. Then, you make—oh, fifteen years later, several thousand drinks later, two or three divorces, God knows how many broken friendships and an exile of one kind or another—some kind of breakthrough, which is your first articulation of who you are: that is to say, your first articulation of who you suspect we all are.”
I felt the liberation and respite Baldwin describes when I read Phil Goldstein’s debut collection How to Bury a Boy at Sea. The book, which Ruth Awad describes as “searing and urgent,” is nothing short of sobering.
Daringly intimate, Goldstein’s collection recounts his experiences of childhood sexual abuse with an undulating cadence — a journey of innocence lost, of the resilient capacity to endure and to heal. Across the book’s five sections, Goldstein moves from shore to synagogue, from past to present, etching the pervasive reverberations of a childhood cloistered by the patterns of shifting tides. And the indeterminacy of reclaiming one’s identity haunts the collection as Goldstein writes “If I carry something with me wherever I go does it become / part of me?”
It is within this uncertainty that Goldstein’s verse flourishes. Shorn against the immensity of isolation and confusion inherent to childhood abuse, Goldstein employs an earnest poetics to excise the ineffable. He bears witness to the traumas of his life, of a boyhood sequestered on “an alien shore, alone.” He shares, in the form of a litany, the ways in which masculinity so often alienates male survivors. Goldstein incants over and over the stipulations of ‘acceptable’ manhood: “real men aren’t named Wilde & Whitman & Ginsberg / & Baldwin & Auden & O’Hara” ; “You’re not a real man if you wait / until you’re twenty-one to be inside a woman & / don’t know what you’re doing at first” ; and “Real men don’t let others / make them do anything.”
Goldstein incisively aims these repetitions at the procession of silencing and victimization that characterizes childhood abuse. His use of the ampersand, too, reverberates this almost indelible association of masculinity and shame. More intimate than a simple conjunction, the ampersand implies a connection that exists outside of our phonetic grasp; an alliance between forces that pervade, just like the effects of Goldstein’s abuse.
Yet out of this deluge of denial and shame, he conjures a voice within himself that refuses to be relegated, a voice he uses to pronounce “I am a promontory, gauzy in sunshine” with “the sea lapping green below.” And he shares this voice with his readers, reminding them “we are so much more than what we buried,” that each of us—every person who has ever survived something we once saw as bigger than ourselves, something we thought insurmountable—“We are the testaments to the fact that gates can rust & not break.”
Goldstein concludes his book with the eponymous “How to Bury a Boy at Sea.” Elegiac, yet sanguine, the poem ties together the currents which underwrite the collection, and in a moment of tender vulnerability, Goldstein lays to rest the boy inside of himself: “I kissed his forehead, then smoothed his hair & thanked him / for living long enough to see this day, for being / both a boy & something more, something sublime.”
This radical act of self-burial enables Goldstein to distill the tempestuous waters of his childhood into the balm which quiets his suffering, and in writing his recovery into existence, he creates a language for readers to do the same. As such, How to Bury a Boy at Sea is a cogent reminder that we, too, can heal.
I’m not sure if I believe in predestination, but I can say with certainty that Goldstein’s book found me when I needed it most. Although our lived experiences differ, I heard in his verse a cadence all too familiar, an echo of someone yearning to reconcile the pieces of themself once broken. I felt, in that strange, parasocial way, a sense of kinship with Goldstein, an understanding born out of intimacy and atrocity. I wept at the harrowing depths of his circumstances, and I delighted in witnessing his redemption. I took comfort in his unwavering honesty, and I found in his poetry a praxis for my own healing.
To Phil Goldstein, thank you for lending us your voice; undoubtedly, your work is helping someone, somewhere make sense of their world. To the readers of Barnstorm, the next time you find yourself turning to poetry in search of sustenance, look to How to Bury a Boy at Sea. And if you’re anything like me, Goldstein’s poems might provide you the exact words you need.
Seth Lewis is a poetry reader for Barnstorm Journal. A Shakespearean by trade, his latest article appears in Multicultural Shakespeare, though his main interest lies in iced coffee. When he isn’t busy making playlists, he can be found working at Harvard University.