Where We Lay Down by Jeffrey Franklin (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Where We Lay Down by Jeffrey Franklin
• Adam Vines (bio)

where we lay down Jeffrey Franklin
Kelsay Books
https://kelsaybooks.com/products/where-we-lay-down
104 pages; Print, $18.50

Divided into six sections, Jeffrey Franklin's debut collection, Where We Lay Down, covers quite a bit of ground while still remaining cohesive, ribboning themes of patrilineal inheritances and relationships, masculinities, and place and history as overt demarcations and imposed signifiers and as subtle figurations for identity and memory. Each section is titled—"Fathers and Sons," "Making Love," Making War," "Homing," "Totem Animals," and "Full Emptiness"—and begins with an epigraph that helps frame the section and nods to Franklin's indebtedness to poets who influenced his style and formal acuity, such as Donald Justice, James Fenton, James Dickey, and Les Murray, among others. Furthermore, Franklin provides his father's drawings as introductions to the sections, further guiding the readers into the poems. All these reinforcements solidifying the structural, thematic, and rhetorical integrity of each section could come across as too leading and didactic, creating too much compartmentalization; however, I find the influences of epigraphs, of influential poets, and of a father's vision through his art fascinating, focusing my attention on the nuances of human relationships and relationships within art before I step into the poems opening each section. Franklin is a master of organization and considers deeply about an audience's engagement with his poems, which is so refreshing. [End Page 115]

The title of Franklin's collection, too, pulls at themes related to place, identity, and memory. Invoking the communal "we," he asks the audience to think about where they have lain before, where they have sprawled out or slept, where they have found comfort as children, as adults, and in this exercise, the audience considers these places and what comprises them and how they have shaped their identities and ideas about the world. In "Personal Effects," the plural third-person point of view drives the "voyeur's piety" of going through a loved one's objects ("cuff links," "pen nibs," "long discharged batteries"), which give us insight into the lived experience of "you" as well as "an unpredicted cache" of photographs "you" took of "a jaunty sailor, / a turbaned sultan, a harlequin with "Smitty" / penned on the back." All these "personal effects" combine to become monikers of "a life lived / by the ordering of the ordinary," which in itself is a brilliant ars poetica and speaks both to the observations of the "we" and the photographer's skill of capturing his subjects at ease "by never to anyone acting superior, / smoothing the awkward into belonging."

In "The Persistence of Place," in the section titled "Homing," the speaker, represented as a ghost, "an unexpected guest in my own past life," meditates on the significance of place and revisits a past home divested of its objects. Instead of seeing emptiness, the ghost recognizes what resides in absences, in the negative spaces, in the almost indiscernible what-was-once-present, like the innateness of a ghost and "like the man who goes to work and returns / home to everything inexplicably gone— / dents in the carpet, fill-in-theblank dust patterns." Only in absences can this man in the simile discern the messy and flawed topographies of what remains, "the wall's geography of rivering cracks and continental stains," and resign himself to thinking that

we are the places we've livedless that we leave behind some part of us

than that each leaves in us a part of it,becoming the map that guides as we fill it in.

To Franklin, place and being are inseparable.

In "Totem Animals," the penultimate section of the collection, Franklin celebrates a few of the most unsung and peculiar animals and humbly ventures to find in humans' rawest natures, when stripped of our fanciful thumbs [End Page 116] and over-reasoned noggins, their emblematic vestiges. With the same tweezered observations and tethered fascinations as Sexton, Bishop, Neruda, Marianne Moore, and Ted Hughes, Franklin fancies the odd critters and their mannerisms over the doted-upon pop stars of the natural world and reckons these vagabonds, whom we find bristled in...