I Think I'd Rather Roar

In Matthew Freeman's latest collection, I Think I'd Rather Roar, there is a short poem that is key to his poetic process. "The Reason for My Emptiness" says that someone broke into his room, handled his favorite artifacts, "and then they put everything back perfectly." His familiar artifacts are the ones that he uses here and throughout his sparkling poetic career. The epigraph to this assemblage comes from Jonas 1:8 whereby lot Jonas is discovered to be the cause of the tempest that is endangering their shipboard lives, and the sailors ask him to reveal himself truthfully. For the purposes of these poems Matt is the modern Jonas revealing his valuables accumulated by exposure, experience, and memory. They include famous figures (Stravinsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Harold Bloom, Martin Luther, and Bob Dylan), streets of St. Louis (Grand, Delmar, and Forsyth), and familiar haunts (under the Arch, SLU, Jesuit Hall, and Webster Groves). The recognizable people and places are sometimes used for their realities and sometimes as metaphors for states of mind. Abstractions can become personifications: "I wanted to write a letter / to Trauma, / but I was heckled by Rhetoric / and told to shut up." The muses of the poets like Fiammetta and Beatrice have their modern counterparts in Starla: "As the fireworks begin / I go looking for Starla," and Julia: "It was the time for lightning and miracles / and I'd just told a turgid lie to Julia." We learn that Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill" was a turning point in his life. "Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea." Such may be the epitaph for his next volume. Dr Eugene Crook -Professor Emeritus, Florida State University.