Bags and Tools: Poems by Michael Fleming (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Bags and Tools: Poems by Michael Fleming
• Laura C. Stevenson (bio)

bags and tools: poems
Michael Fleming
Green Writers Press
https://greenwriterspress.com/book/bags-and-tools/
76 pages; Print, $15.95

From the quadrameter title poem with which it begins to the celebrational sonnet with which it concludes, Michael Fleming's Bags and Tools, the winner of the Sundog Poetry Book Award of 2021, is a debut collection in which every poem reveals penetrating vision, crafted with such care that its technique appears effortless.

While the collection is filled with a variety of subjects, moods, and memories that reflect a long and thoughtful poetic history, Fleming has placed his most recent works in his first section, "Just a Word." As suggested by Frances Cannon's haunting sketch of a seventeenth-century plague doctor, most of the section's poems are concerned with the pandemic. Of these, the most impressive—both technically and philosophically—is "Corona," a sequence of seven interlocking sonnets. The sequence opens with an echo of the Book of Genesis but quickly shifts to the perceptions of a TV audience:

In the beginning it was just a word—somekind of bug, a blip in the news,another ambient danger, like murderand bad service and diaper rash—the duesfor being alive, one more thing to thinkabout.

Soon, however, the word becomes a danger that can't be dismissed:

It began to cover the sunand we said this isn't happening, sinkinginto the sea isn't happening, noneof this is real, unpredicted eclipsescannot occur, we will not allow [End Page 120] it. Then all at once night fell—time was strippedof meaning, birds stopped singing in a cloudy,starless sky. No hint of dawn. We musthave failed to see this coming, most of us.

"Most of us" implies that a few people did see coming doom, but while that idea hovers in the air, the second sonnet merely portrays the sorrow of a society that now recognizes its former inattention:

We failed to see it coming, most of us,because we never thought about the plagueor pestilence—antique notions we musthave forgotten.

After describing suddenly newfound fear, the iambics break into a nightmare disorientation that mixes past and present:

Everything we thought we knewwas wrong, delusional, a dream of climbingan endless staircase made of sand, lightinfected with darkness and distrust, timeturned viscous, like glue.

Soon, there are masks. They appear in the fourth sonnet, with a beautifully phrased remembrance of days when "our faces / were unmasked, unmistakable." Now, however,

Our masks are the price we payFor breathing, venturing out. We were wrongAbout so much. We were masked all along.

Picking up the theme, the fifth sonnet continues:

We were masked all along, and it took wearingmasks to know that. Now we look like whatwe always were—midwives and bandits, caregiversand surgeons, sneak thieves, desperadoes.Who doesn't love a costume—we'd allDie of shame if our souls were bare! [End Page 121]

With the introduction of "costume," "mask" becomes "masque"—a tragedy in which we players plan to "wear masks of love and loss and crimes/of passion." But our attempt to act out familiar scenes fails.

The curtain rises as the house goes dark—suddenly everything goes wrong. We're allnaked, our masks hide nothing. When we callout "line!" we get silence. We miss our marks,forget our parts, plead with God.

In the midst of this chaos, the director rants "about the music, it's all wrong because / singing is forbidden—it always was."

And so we are left in the silence of a winter in which singing is forbidden:

The months unfoldwithout rhythm, without sequence—a feverdream of silence flowing like a herdof deer over a fence. It's getting cold.We didn't want this. We couldn't believeit at first, when it still was just a word.

As the last sonnet's conclusion echoes the sequence's opening line, we've come full circle—and "we" is, as it has been throughout, an...