Elephant
-
- €8.99
-
- €8.99
Publisher Description
“A serious young man, / I had trouble saying yes / to the bright, clear days,” Soren Stockman’s Elephant begins. The poems that follow move through despair, self-destruction, and disassociation to arrive, finally, at that elusive affirmation. Accompanied throughout by the imagined presence of Joseph Merrick, the 20th Century entertainer and medical patient popularly depicted as “The Elephant Man,” Stockman’s speaker interrogates how storytellers have co-opted Merrick’s identity and obscured his voice and inner life. In this projected communion, Stockman tries to encounter the man who was rather than the role molded from his experiences. What does it mean to perform as another? What allows us to love ourselves, and what makes it hard? This debut collection is a path out of loneliness, beyond private absences, to the true self and what it harbors in its heart. Here, at the center of things, we succumb to the succor of existence, given to the light: “What a blessing to love the world / and then finally be born.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his perceptive and haunting debut, Stockman conjures the ghost of Joseph Merrick, known in popular culture as the Elephant Man. (Stockman remarks on feeling an affinity for Merrick after playing him in a production of Bernard Pomerance's 1977 play The Elephant Man.) In the opening poems, the speaker struggles to understand and cope with their emotions and desires, all of which are potentially sinister and all-encompassing. In "Blood Flowers," love is threatening: "Then love begins to bite through me,/ calling my name in the dark, eating my body./ Placenta percreta: like the jerk and groan of muscle,/ a child tunnels up through my gullet." In "Elephant Man," Stockman speaks as Merrick, expressing with bleak clarity the alienation of being different: "shame that did not hold up to the hot light of my own/ investigation." The poems that follow this centerpiece feature Merrick as an observer and companion to the speaker, an avatar who reflects on the speaker's feelings about himself: "And building// himself, unwieldy through years, he topples into caverns/ of himself." The final section explores love for the self and others, emerging triumphantly in response to the self-analysis of the earlier poems. This is an acute and tender work of self-discovery and acceptance.
