Padmaja Battani Reviews Asa Boxer’s The Narrow Cabinet
Boxer, Asa. The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle. Guernica Editions, $19.95, 90 pp. ISBN 978-1-771837-17-0
Asa Boxer’s latest poetry collection, The Narrow Cabinet, is an attempt to discover the vital desires within the rapidly transforming world. Exploring themes of nostalgia, zombie culture and catastrophes, Boxer’s satirical tone and refined wit call upon the imagined voices of historical figures like Frank Cole, Jacques Mayol, The Great Wallenda, A.M Klein, Chuck Fipke, and others.
In the hands of a master poet, objects like a crow made of iron, an old Victorian walkup, moths, a turtle and an antique cabinet are transformed. Asa Boxer instills life into every object and microcosmic perception, depicting clear images and a strong emotions. The strength of his style lies in his careful word choice. The poet reveals unseen details, exposing the mysteries that lie beneath the surface of an “old-time cabinet” in a poem with the same title. The description paints the cabinet as grandfatherly, with hooked shoulders and arthritic joints. Finding virtue, beauty and love in that narrow cabinet is a perspective that contains a whole world. This is the poem that I kept returning to, and it felt more profound each time.
“the weights that drive the revolution
are ticking down, but so gradually,
you don’t get the sense of falling
and unravelling that’s really going on”
The poem “The Tool Maker” mentions Boxer’s grandfather, who fled Old Europe to Southern Quebec. He mastered the art of toolmaking, adding new degrees of beauty to the objects he produced. Though his descendants went on to build cottages, no one inherited his craft. A forlorn ache for the lost skill is implied.
“None were equal to the hands
that built the house they came from”
The vividness of the narrative and the unspoken traits about the spell of material objects combine to create extraordinary poems such as ‘Iron Crow’. The poem recounts the use of the iron crow in crushing house and hearth, forcing door from frame and twisting their brains into a question mark – a tool for mental prying:
“And in the mind, his claw became
the casuist’s scalpel. The heart’s order
that he’d stripped and wrecked on earth,
he found and overturned again within.”
In ‘The Invention of Money’, the speaker states that money was created as a stand-in for real thing and as a medium of exchange with the sole purpose of rewarding labour with roof and food, nothing more than a promise. However, it has transformed into something huge and reigning the world. This piece conveys an array of insights about how money has gained the most vital role in human relations, influencing almost anyone.
Chuck Fipke, the Canadian geologist and prospector who discovered the existence of diamonds around Lac de Gras in Canada's Northwest Territories, is the focus of one of Boxer’s poems. The eponymous poem discusses the effects of human ambition intruding on nature, and killing in the pursuit of materials presumed more valuable than life.
“Either she will tolerate my prying, my staking
claims, or she’ll absorb and knead me
back into herself; but I’ll be damned if I peter
and play it safe—subsist to die of nothing.”
For Frank Cole, who crossed the Sahara on foot and camel-back, no greater crossing remained. He should have died, yet survived. His realization that the Sahara would cure him the way she cured the ancient sea, and that such beauty will not abide for long, is painted with vivacity and uniformity. This poem also brings up a striking contrast: the region now containing the Sahara Desert, an arid environment, was once underwater.
In the poem named after the German-American high wire artist ‘Great Wallenda’, Boxer imagines his voice confessing that tightrope walk cannot be made easy even with practice, or pretending ‘you’re just a few safe feet above ground’. The speaker affirms that every reflex works against them, and even a minor distraction can cause a fall.
“Until then, I must mind each step.
Where I stand is too profound
to pretend I’m somewhere else”
The speaker’s emotions portrayed in ‘Free Spirit’ about being branded are so precise and vivid, they instantly feel like our own. He ponders, “How am I less bound than she? How is she more bound than me”? And there is so much left unsaid allowing the readers to feel its immensity. There is something intense and intimate about the poem ‘Loving Friday’. Inferring silence as the verve for flames of love and words as wayward moths bringing in anguishes unfolds strong metaphors and lyricism.
Images that stayed with me include Boxer’s vision of duty as “some concoction of fear and love and courage and pride”, “emptying the heart like a closet of childhood junk” from the poem ‘The Tale of Trudging Tiberius’, and the “domesticated shuffle of creatures” at the metro from ‘Workflow 2020’.
In ‘The Ghoul Guard’, I was struck by Boxer’s vision of sanity as a matter of consensus. Other poems, such as ‘Sensitive Ears’, ‘Poached Pleasure’, and ‘Metamorphosis’, approach themes of conflict resolution, desolate reality, and individuality fusing into unity.
This collection exemplifies the desires, uncertainties, and struggles through the ups and downs of life in the rapidly transforming world. The poem “Diagnosis” talks about how real living is abandoned in the process of creating a road map for life, keeping records of money, presetting default values:
“A metaphysic of the ledger ruled,
stealing quality from life in measures,
till joy and passion gave us the slip,
for all we knew were calculated pleasures”
Padmaja Battani lives in Connecticut/Ontario. She received an MA in English Literature. Her prose and poetry appeared in Sierra Poetry Festival, Trouvaille Review, The Temz Review, Coffee People Magazine, League of Canadian Poets, Black Cat Magazine and elsewhere. Her latest passion is hiking. She is currently working on a poetry collection.