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| Martin Ott's "Captive" won the 2011 De Novo Poetry Prize by C&R Press and was published in 2012. Order it here. |
The word “captive” is multi-dimensional in Martin Ott’s
first full-length collection of poetry.
A former U.S. Army interrogator, Ott organizes his
musings on military life in tight, efficient lines and stanzas. “The
interrogator’s notebook is more frightening / when closed. That means the
questions / have ended,” (p. 14) he intimates matter-of-factly, but with a hint
of shame (he knows he’s frightened people in his life). In “Breathless,” he
tells us the hierarchical protocol for the gas mask drill: “When it is time to
take off the masks / the lowest ranking soldier tests the air” (p. 6). Such
lines appear to be straightforward glimpses into military life, until aha lines like “The lesson was: masks
work” (p. 6).
Because Ott, we are to presume, has had these often dark
and complicated experiences--which he tells of compassionately, with a strong
grasp of craft, and with no goal toward shock value—we trust his observations
about, say, magic tricks. We are glad the person speaking is seeing lighter,
happier scenes, like his daughter in a sandbox.
But Ott, who is comfortable and effective employing both
first person and omniscient perspectives, wants us to see “home” through the
lens of one who is captive to the hidden, deeper level of meaning his
experience has enforced. In “What Has My Daughter Done Now to Pablo Neruda?”
Ott hints at the politics of censorship (i.e., book-burning, the fiery
culmination of his daughter’s zeal for the Chilean poet’s Selected Poems) in a way
that underscores the secrecy and reverence for documents and truths in the
poet’s “other” life as an interrogator. He posits his daughter as having
inherited both his love of Neruda (“her favorite” p. 16) and his desire to
guard or take ownership of certain words and ideas, to extract them. He tells
us he has “not forbidden [his] girl from bruising [Neruda] or sailing / him
like a ship at bath time to where words / and dreams fight like lizards on a
cliff beach” (p. 17).
Like father, like daughter?
Earlier, in “Baby CPR,” and through his daughter, Ott
learns to save an innocent life, rather than (we again presume) to threaten a
potentially non-innocent one.
Ott’s best poems show how a military experience breaks
into life back home. In “Mine,” the speaker visits his native Alaska on a
hunting expedition with his father. The weight of their relationship is an
arsenal strapped and holstered to their bodies. Just as they begin to forge a
connection through whiskey-ed campfire reminiscences, a misfire, when the
father insensitively prompts the speaker to kill a wandering bear cub; the son
“missed the shot on purpose,” while the father is frightened that he, a
soldier, took it in the first place. Later, the father introduces the speaker
as “my son, the killer” (p. 25). A few pages later, in the litany-esque
“Doors,” the emotional distance of the speaker is more evident: “Some doors are
wrapped / in human clothes and they are mostly closed” (p. 27).
In parallel of a returned soldier’s displacement from two
worlds at once, Ott hinges his collection on a duality of equal parts overt and
subtle political poems. The former are self-contained statements (“Exchange” is
a memorable summary), while the more civilian poems quietly weave between the
detritus of everyday realism—an X-ray machine, a maple syrup breakfast, a stick
shift—and an at once banal and stark truth about humanity. Stark, in fact,
because of its banality: how can torture and games with our children happen in
the same world?
As one who has witnessed both normalized violence in a
war-world and the slow boil of accepted violence in a “normal” world, Martin
Ott is superbly equipped to break the silence for those who haven’t, to get to
the truths of his personal journey at all costs, and to captivate.
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