Voices from the Past

Early on in Voices from the Past Peter Mladinic set down some prescriptive rules for dealing with memory and loss. In the poem “If” Mladinic tells us: “If you don’t go where they are and knock / they'll go on with their lives. / Should some sight or sound remind them of you / it will be you don’t care, you never loved them. / You tell yourself approaching that shore / I love, loved and will love them. They are better / left alone, going on as they have been / since the morning I set out from the mainland. / I had to. That much was clear.” For my money, the poet is cataloguing Existence—as in the poem “Reciprocity” that assembly is a dialogue that begins: “If you help me get what I want I’ll help / you, Ethel, one of the dead, / cold in your grave, wanting everything.” The poet is saying what others are thinking, of the Spirits of the Dead: If you’ll help me, I’ll make you visible again. Which is what Mladinic does with small dogs and great boxers—he brings the world that is passing, and has passed to never return, into view with no small degree of reverence for the true-ish as well as the truth. Not to understate the whimsy of “Autobiography,” saying: “An autobiography / of a lizard should contain the lizard’s preferred / bowling team, it’s preferred soup and rainforest.” And so it should. — Roy Bentley, author of Walking with Eve in the Loved City, and Starlight Taxi.