The Caveat Onus: Book Two by Dave Brinks
Dave Brinks’ The Caveat Onus: Book Two, the second installment in the Caveat Onus trilogy, is first a structural work of art; without its form, it would be too disconnected from its audience and would mean little for both the reader and the poet, for this collection of poems is as much a journey for Brinks as for his readers. The poems embody a mental journey for the author during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and carefully, though somewhat confusingly, bring the reader along on the exploration. Each poem, or meditation, in The Caveat Onus: Book Two consists of thirteen lines constructed as two hexagrams, with one middle line serving, as Brinks says, as “the center of a sphere, with a line moving through that point in space, in opposite directions.” Moreover, the meditations are sonnegrams, in which the first and last lines, second and second to last lines, third and third to last lines, and so on, correspond and move inward, until reaching the middle line, which is the seventh, the axis of the poem. The seventh line can also begin the poem, from which the lines would move outward in the same corresponding pattern.
This pattern works through the four sections of the book, and these axes in the poetry create a movement in and among the poems and bring a surrealistic quality to the work as readers move with Brinks through memory and discovery. There is finally an axis for the whole book; Brinks refers to this most important axis as a vanishing point, or the point on a physical plane where everything disappears. This vanishing point is in the fourth section of the book and is the convergence of the poet’s world and the reader’s ability to understand it, in that a need for the concrete gives way to the arena of the mind.
One does not have to read the notes on the text in order to realize that there is something often unnerving and different happening in the book, and one may neither grasp nor enjoy the book upon an initial sitting with it; these sentiments of the reader most likely stem from a misunderstanding of the structure and point of Brinks’ work. Thus, reading The Caveat Onus: Book Two is continually frustrating. The language alienates the reader, in that the images seem to be part of the poet’s memory and are not yet fleshed out enough for the reader to understand or explore. A reader senses the poetry more than connects with it; a reader knows that the poems must be more than disconnected remembrances and observances or random images gathered from clips of the poet’s experience, but it is difficult to provide an explanation for this feeling that something bigger is happening on the pages of the book. This, of course, is a result of the structural intricacies, which cause a general frustration with the reading; because of the movement of the work, there seems to be no point at which the reader can grip onto the words, to become a part of the author’s pictures and seeming abstractions. Yet page after page the reader’s feeling that the poems are supposed to both convey to and create in the reader the author’s deep feelings grows stronger; at the same time, the reader realizes that the problem with the images is not that they are not full enough, but that they seem to be too much a part of the poet’s world, which does not quite feel real. The poems, both individually and as a collection, seem to be the essence of a memory, which one can explain but in which one can never totally include another person. Yet the poet moves so fluidly through the work that it must be real enough to be understood; this further leaves the reader with the feeling that there is no place for an outsider in this work.
Just when the frustration reaches its peak, and when the reader feels the past hour has been wasted trying to understand something which has no meaning to anyone but the poet, it happens: in the last of the four sections of the book, Brinks begins taking lines and images from earlier poems and creating new poems with them. In these restructured pieces, the images have not changed; they retain the same essence of a memory that characterizes the book. Yet they come together full circle; in just a handful of poems, the feelings of frustration disappear as the reader somehow comes to share in the memories and the poems with the poet. It is as if writing these clips of experience and having someone read them is the only way Brinks could ever convey what the poems mean to him. In this way The Caveat Onus: Book Two becomes a shared experience; reading Brinks’ thoughts and memories makes them part of the reader as well, and when the images come back together in the last section, an understanding comes with them. Possibly after the reading of the notes on the text, a reader not only feels but finally sees how the symmetry and patterns in the work have converged both on the page and in the mind.
A look at meditation ninety-eight, the poem Brinks describes as the vanishing point, exemplifies the fluid yet symmetrical style that is both the beauty and the challenge in this work; this poem also embodies the journey on which Brinks has gone and taken his readers:
the caveat on us 1
is a great tear in the dreamwork
forced upon the mind
like a terrible sound
that only compares with silence
where everything belongs to water
and whose sadnesses have no equal or worse 7
O Memory let these creatures stir
snap the teeth of your dragon’s snout
send forgetfulness to repair their suffering
the song of the hawk
knows no boundaries
The readers have seen most of these lines before, but in this poem they come together in a new way. As mentioned before, the first and last lines, the second and second to last lines, and so forth, are symmetrical, centered around the axis of the poem, the seventh line. If one starts at the poem’s axis and works out, one sees how Brinks’ feelings of sadness, which throughout the book have been evident to readers, stem from water, the hurricane, and the memories surrounding it. Brinks then speaks of the pain of the silenced city, its suffering people, and the plea to forget in order to repair what happened. Finally, the reader’s memory of Brinks’ story meets Brinks’ own memory, and the boundless capabilities of memory exist in the “tear in the dreamwork,” the space “between heaven and earth” where there is no need for concrete explanations. For the reader’s and Brinks’ memories and emotions have converged; the mind, not reality, is the haven of this story.