Review: Monster Colloquia by Robert Campbell

reviewed by Sally Smits Masten

Monster Colloquia
Robert Campbell
Hellbox Publications, April 2020
$7.99; 34 pp.
ISBN: 9781734888904

For about a year, while we were binge-watching The Walking Dead, I would walk the dogs and think about how I might (or likely wouldn’t) survive a zombie apocalypse. My sense of the world distorted by Rick Grimes and the stumbling, slavering hordes of the undead, I would think about how long it would take to walk the length of North Carolina, my total lack of skills with weaponry, where I would find my own stash of chocolate pudding like Carl did.

What I didn’t think about was how I might feel as one of the zombies, stepping on my companions’ toes, seeing them lose a limb here, an extremity there. I didn’t think about if I would share food with them, if I would carry a zombie-friend who had lost a leg. That’s by design, of course—in most of our narratives, no matter how emotionally complex the villain or how morally fraught the hero, we still know with whom we ought to identify—the transgression is in finding shreds of humanity in the demonized characters or in doubting our hero even for a moment. And empathy for the villain, the zombie, the outsider, the menace?  That just isn’t done.

And that, by my mind, is the particular brilliance of Robert Campbell’s chapbook, Monster Colloquia. In the most unlikely places—a high school locker room, the cubicle farm that “reeks of tuna,” the dentist’s office—Campbell creates beauty. And through the most unlikely characters, he allows humor, kindness, tenderness, sorrow, and sweetness to shine. The poems ask us to consider the loneliness of ghosts, constantly exorcised and “forever shouting between walls”; to experience the desperation of the zombies, shunned and hungry; to feel the vulnerability and fear of Davy Jones, awaiting biopsy results. In short, we end up feeling with these monsters, these “others” we have been taught to reject and fear.

Campbell’s poems are also very funny, a surprise and a contrast that heightens the tenderness for all his monstrous characters. For example, “Problems for Ghosts” opens, perfectly, “Every asshole owned a ouija board./ Everyone burned sage.” But the next lines carry the poem beyond the funny to the tender, resonant Os creating the most sorrowful of sounds, followed by a lonely proclamation: “We holed up // in the old boat house. We weren’t / welcome anywhere.” The poem keeps turning between isolation and connection, humor and hurt. Indeed, the humor seems to emerge from the exhaustion of dealing with being perpetually misunderstood and feared.

Other poems in the book are similarly witty and imaginative, heartbreaking and empathic. “Zombie Dialectic,” as an example, opens with lines that startle readers into laughter: “Having eaten the city of Louisville / and after losing many limbs, we marched.” Those absurd images then turn toward the poignant: the zombies “without legs or with one / clenched another’s shoulder.” And they do not mean to terrorize the passersby; as a chorus, they explain, “we never hated, not one, not once.” Several other poems track Davy Jones as he grows up, from a tough-talking teenager to a vengeance-focused but vulnerable twenty-something, and Campbell does not shy away from the wonderfully funny puns available nor from the anguish and isolation of being found monstrous. The first in the series, for example, is titled “Davy Jones, Age 15, Is Afraid of the Locker Room.” The opening lines explain that it’s “not because he’s ashamed of his privates, but due to recurring dreams of pirates.” Again, though the play on words is inventive and witty, Campbell goes further, plunges into gorgeously rendered imagery and into Davy’s fears and desires: “In these dreams, he wants to gather them up into his demon arms and kiss them, carry them down to imaginary depths. After dodgeball, Davy wades across floorboards glazed with wax, his sixteen tentacles trailing like a mop.” Our bemusement turns to empathy, seeing Davy waver between vulnerability and machismo, loneliness and guardedness.

True to the themes of Monster Colloquia, the “heroes” remain rather disengaged, their faces blank, sometimes actually asleep—they are, in short, less interesting than the monsters.  Campbell’s poetry is no less elegant; the opening poem is a mosaic of phrases from the Odyssey paired with the speaker’s more jaded self-reflections. In that poem, we have heroes who “can risk hell, hazard // halls of the dead for snarls / of rank gold hair,” and a speaker who is bored by them all, asserting, “Three true / things I can say about heroes // at rest: they are dull, dull, / dull.” The speaker’s self-reflection and incisive language are the focus here—the question, always hovering, about why the speaker doesn’t identify as much with these heroes. These observations of the heroes are a necessary counterpoint in the collection, but in the end, the speaker, it seems, would much rather be at the symposium of Gorgons, vampires, and a giant squid.

The chapbook delivers exactly that symposium: it is a gathering of monsters, revealing their tender bellies and vulnerabilities, reveling in their turns of phrase. The language and forms are highly crafted; the Davy Jones poems are dense, nearly claustrophobic prose poems, perfect for a heart stuffed full of anger and vengeance. The Shakespearean sonnet, “Hero, By Which I Mean,” is pitch-perfect, using the form for a polished veneer, using the turns to undermine its titular hero. The title poem and its companion, “Post-Apocalyptic Platitudes,” deftly use fragments and enjambed lines to celebrate the subversion of clichés, the rejuvenation of that tired language through a monster’s perspective.

Most importantly, Campbell convinces us to identify with the monsters, to step into their shoes, their horde, their lonely boathouses, their deep sea, and to empathize with those characters we have been taught since childhood to fear. In so doing, this book responds with grace and wit and imagination to our current moment, our divisive climate of anger, hate, and fear of “others,” the constant refrain of “us” versus “them.” There is, by my mind, nothing more important that literature can do right now.

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Sally Smits Masten’s poems have been published in The Georgia Review, Smartish Pace, Crab Orchard Review, Buffalo Carp, and elsewhere.