Tunnel Visions and Fervor Dreams: Roy Duffield’s Bacchus Against the Wall

Voices and mouths can tell you a lot about the creatures that possess them. Fangs, foam, punched-out teeth or limp, lolling tongues. When lashing, does it scream or hiss or spit out something venomous, or does it dull down to a plateau and wait for the tension to pass? Words and their arrangement, spoken or scribbled down, can be guttural yowls or precious whimpers. When you hear poetry, trapped in your mind or chucked at the wall, does it land like wet paper spaghetti? Or does it summon up a bull and lay waste to the dusty china shop that’s tried to keep it timid? In Roy Duffield’s book of poems, ‘Bacchus Against the Wall’, the containment of chaos within a ritualistic, written pulse has the power to burn away what needs destroying, activate a peculiar new light, and elevate the sharp-toothed denizens scattered across the corners of the earth. 

keep yr himalayas
i cant even c m
frm up here
keep yr theories
  n yr ideas
ive got my ecstasies
   & my wild
animal
fears

Separating out selections, like above from ‘keep yr photos’, is an impossible task. Each poem is a howl that emits, echoes, and swallows itself, and dicing one line from the next is to perform a root canal on a wolf in heat. This is what entrancement through words is meant to produce. In the case of Duffield’s poetry, you are at the mercy of a river that simultaneously carries and drowns, sly nature and its true, bestial enrapturement. What differs, though, from other collections that attempt the same ritual is the clarity and precision with which Bacchus Against the Wall lobotomizes the husk of plainclothes savagery. 

In ‘keep yr photos’, ‘The Queen of Heart’, ‘things to ban’, and all across the work, the jolting pace doesn’t deteriorate into navel-gazing or a self-pity-stew that sits in the mouth like a mother’s bad cooking. You aren’t forced to swallow vague critiques of society and its half-visaged inhabitants. The reader can feel the lived and pointed edge of Duffield’s experiences, odd vantage points, and madman’s clairvoyance. The writing holds the tension between the heavy, dead machinations of the world and the untamable spirit of true human grit. Without direct protesting, the social themes of the writing are shown in their naked grotesqueness, bottled up in eccentric flasks, and poured out across the pavement to mix with seagull shit and discarded bones. A special sort of alchemy is the undeniable result.

There can also be a failure within poetry to ‘play with form’ and hide the bloodlessness of the actual writing, a tendency that this collection doesn’t suffer. Choppy waters are made so by the stirring kick of language and intent. The sense of playfulness is genuine and effective and serves the poems more than distracting from the pieces in their entirety. 

in all probability,
noun-verb-adjectives—
all humanity’ S.
err-
—or—

Twisting language like this excerpt from ‘construction work’ pushes and pulls the reader up, down, and across the page, giving the impression of being elbowed through a jostling crowd. Disorientation within the piece allows for a greater sense of liminal existence. The pressure of the form works handily with the intensity of the poetry, accentuated further by the ‘structured chaos’ of Bacchus Against the Wall’s arrangement. Gnashing verses give way to haikus, to clever breaks in the collection, and to well-placed tricks of format. There is no self-satisfied droning, but a genuine engagement with the eyes, mind, and invisible wild animal tongue of the reader. You can smell, hear, taste, and nearly touch the splendor, horror, and untethered delight of Duffield’s observations.

The two longer pieces of the collection, ‘The Ballad of the Newsman’ and ‘Bacchus Against the Wall -or- the orgy you know damn well’s coming’ drive like rain distilled in bathtubs, deranging and cleansing the mind of ease. Any particular segment, such as this one from the writhing epic of ‘Bacchus Against the Wall -or- the orgy you know damn well’s coming’, immediately overwhelms the mind with kaleidoscopic fervor:

We stood outside your houses

and watched you bathing

in artificial glow.

We took each individual

window and turned them on

one another, thrust

them up against

one another in an erotic kiss

until the glass broke

and doused us all

with sand, blood and the old, familiar feel

of unfamiliar flesh.

These longer poems are the straw-hat crowns of the masquerade, wild and bleeding and swirling the reader into an ultimate catharsis. 

While ‘The Ballad of the Newsman’ more resembles a forgotten myth, ‘Bacchus Against the Wall -or the orgy you know damn well’s coming’ throws punches and hoists shots and spins its storm until the words collapse into an ecstatic, collective thrill. Both poems are masterfully paced, sending the reader down one backstreet to race along the next, marching through underground tunnels and decadent catacombs. Location, face, and history are blurred into obsolescence, leaving the only true thing—lived, livid experience. The amount of vivacity that leap-frogs from one line to the next is unwavering, undiluted, and shines with the sacred impossibility of a matchbook altar flame. 

Whether crying out like an animal in heat, parsing curses through subtle haikus, or carnival barking at the construction-smog polluted moon, Bacchus Against the Wall never slips into self-aggrandizing fantasy or threadbare political scolding. The collection leaves a feeling of unadulterated sublimation, drunk but well-aware of the cards kept hidden up the false prophet’s bureaucratic sleeve. The writing doesn’t distract from reality and all its rot and spectacle, but expands the perspective through which it can be discerned. The creature doesn’t speak in mews, whines, or murmured platitudes meant for false-won peace and stagnation. Its teeth are red from chewing at the bars, drinking up the ballistic bootleg wine, and spitting real blood from its primal, aching heart.