Reviewed by Keith Kopka
13th Balloon, Mark Bibbins's fourth collection of poetry, is a beautiful, mesmerizing book-length elegy dedicated to his friend who passed away from AIDS in the early 1990s. Bibbins's collection embraces the personal, as well as the social tradition of the elegy and asks readers to bear witness to the speaker's individual grief against the larger backdrop of the American AIDS crisis. This juxtaposition allows the voice in these poems to confront the subject of loss with both the immediacy of social fear and the reflective grace of survival and memory.
The elements of the traditional poetic elegy usually mirror the three accepted stages of loss and grief. A traditional elegy begins with a lament for the dead, in which the speaker of the poem conveys their grief for loss of their beloved. Next, the elegiac speaker typically praises their dead loved one and idealizes them, often reflecting on their life and portraying them as someone who was always, in fact, too good for the world of the living. Lastly, a traditional elegy resolves itself in a place of comfort and consolation, where the speaker often arrives at the epiphany of acceptance. Although these traditional threads of the elegy are present in 13th Balloon, Bibbins challenges these traditions by using the well-known conventions of the form to his advantage to subvert his readers' expectations.
There are many sections of 13th Balloon that lament the dead, but they do so through a candid and often darkly humorous understanding of the speaker's own mortality that grounds readers in the larger socio-political moment of the AIDS crises that contextualizes these poems. There is a clear sadness for the loss of the beloved, but this sadness moves beyond self-centered lamentation to illustrate the vulnerability and mortality of the LGBTQ community. Bibbins evokes this idea through metaphor in the opening section of the poem:
As a house burns sparks
land on the roofs
of houses nearbySome of them also will burn
Some of them will not
Someone asks Are there people insideSometimes there are people inside
They may walk out alive or be carried
out alive they may be carried
in pieces they may
be carried in bags they may
be carried by smokeOthers in dreaming may wonder
whether they ever will wake
from the endless dream of sparks
clinging to their roofs
floating through their windows
landing on their beds
The tone of vulnerability continues throughout other sections of the poem where readers are confronted again and again with various representations of death, some literal and some more metaphorical, which come together to present mortality as a kind of uncontrollable force that is impacting the world of these poems along with the speaker's sense of self.
In keeping with tradition, Bibbins also evokes the memory of his lost loved one. But rather than idealizing him, he memorializes him by evoking the quotidian, the things that are more genuinely left behind after a loss—a book or the memory of a conversation—rather than forcing a grandiose idealization of the person who is gone. There is also a consistency to the way in which the voice in these poems is almost compulsively honest about what has been forgotten, what is remembered, and what replaces memory in the subconscious. For example, in an early section of the poem, the speaker attempts to remember the circumstances around the death of a guinea pig that he threw into the river after it was mysteriously gifted to him. Bibbins writes:
I opened the lid and inside
was a single newborn animal
hairless pink and clean
a rat a guinea pig I couldn't tellWas it moving I don't remember now
why can't I remember that now
It can't have been moving
it couldn't have
been alive
This kind of admission of the speaker's own unreliability in narrative memory occurs throughout the collection and effectively allows the poems to illustrate not only how memory affects one's understanding of loss, but also how it informs one's guilt about living when one is surrounded by death, challenging the traditional elegiac concept of epiphany and acceptance.
Throughout 13th Balloon, Bibbins questions the convenient elegiac landing pad of "acceptance" in a variety of ways. There are several sections of the poem that rely on humor to eschew the stereotype and others that rely heavily on straightforward political commentary to help contextualize the thoughts of the individual within a larger social context. However, one might argue that the most effective of these kinds of moments take place when the speaker finds the courage to admit that he is still lost:
I remember doing this once as a kid
watching a mosquito land on my
forearm then making a fist
after it stuck its sucker in
the muscle fixing it there on my skin
as my blood persisted in filling
the insect's abdomen until
it finally ruptured
leaving a smear
of my blood on my armInstead of arm I first typed art
I tried changing it and changing it
and changing it againNow I don't know what to do
Through this admission of a lack of control on a linguistic level, Bibbins is able to once again illustrate how grief cannot always be resolved through artistic jurisdiction. This theme of futility that runs throughout the collection again connects the speaker's personal experiences to the context of helplessness and social stigmatization in the face of an illness that, in the 1990s, was still largely untreatable.
The poetic tradition of the elegy is rooted in Greek funeral songs, and in its long history it has taken on many iterations. In 13th Balloon, Bibbins has given this storied form new life in a contemporary context. There are collections of poems that are destined to have a larger impact on the history of poetry. However, it is often difficult to spot these great works without the context of time. Fortunately, this is not the case with 13th Balloon. This is a collection that redefines one of poetry's most lasting forms through impeccable craftsmanship, deft social commentary, and a daring and unflinching vulnerability. 13th Balloon is more than an elegy. It is a portrait of how we keep living.