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Hotel Malabar reads as if Brendan Galvin merged the William Faulkner of As I Lay Dying and the Joseph Conrad of The Secret Agent with Elmore Leonards dialogue and the imagery of The Third Man. The result is a narrative poem that reads like a popular novel even as it displays the images and rhythms of a master poet. The setting is a Cape Cod hotel during a mid-1970s summer, and the poem unfolds through the monologues of five distinctive characters, an elderly Yankee banana hand who spent years in Central America as a plantation manager, three federal agents sent to discover his wartime activities there, and an Indian curandero who is the old mans source of medicines. As it moves relentlessly toward its conclusion, this poem/mystery novel/spy thriller asks questions about human motivation, the nature of truth, and the consequences of secrecy and the willing fabrication of illusions, of a life lived in a wilderness of mirrors.
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Hotel Malabar : A Narrative Poem Iowa Poetry Prize
author
:
Galvin, Brendan.
publisher
:
University of Iowa Press
isbn10 | asin
:
087745597X
print isbn13
:
9780877455974
ebook isbn13
:
9781587290770
language
:
English
subject
American poetry.
publication date
:
1998
lcc
:
PS3557.A44H68 1998eb
ddc
:
811/.54
subject
:
American poetry.
Page i
Hotel Malabar
Page ii
Winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize
Page iii
Hotel Malabar
A Narrative Poem by Brendan Galvin
University of Iowa Press Iowa City
Page iv
University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright (c) 1998 by Brendan Galvin All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
Design by Richard Hendel
http://www.uiowa.edu/~uipress
No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. This is a work of poetry; any resemblance to actual events or persons is entirely coincidental.
Parts of this poem originally appeared in Quarterly West.
Printed on acid-free paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Galvin, Brendan. Hotel Malabar: a narrative poem / by Brendan Galvin. p. cm.-(Iowa poetry prize) ISBN 0-87745-597-X (paper) I. Title. II. Series. PS3557.A44H68 1998 811'.54dc21 97-33395
98 99 00 01 02 P 5 4 3 2 1
Page v
For Ellen and Peter and Carla and Ellen and Anne and Patrick and Gwen and Owen and Ellen and Finnbarr and Bramber and Willis and Ellen.
Page vii
Ben: Why, boys, when I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. He laughs. And by God I was rich.
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
... a wilderness of mirrors...
James Jesus Angleton
Absolute secrecy corrupts absolutely.
Fred Hitz, Inspector General, CIA,
New York Times, July 30, 1995
Page 1
Parlin
Tape One: June 23, 1976, Hotel Malabar veranda, Malabar, Cape Cod, Mass., morning
That coat-of-arms over the mantel in there? Its motto, Ves t la manera que van las cosas?"Do you see the way things go?" under that single strand of greenery. That's catbrier, Maggie, and back about where the kitchens are now I used to spend half my hours fighting it off the back walls of mother's cottage. Seems like it'd be up the steps and through the door quick as a poor relation if you turned your back to get a cup of coffee. I scythed it, sickled it, tore it out by hand until I sweated so the mosquitoes traveled from Buzzards Bay just to get their beaks into me. I'd have used a machete if I'd known about one then, but I took hatchets and fileting knives to it, thought of kerosene and matches, except the cedar clapboards put me off that solution. Last thing I wanted was to burn us out, a doghair from the poorfarm as we were anyway, with me gone on the water
Page 2
from age twelve and mother cleaning houses and taking in the sheets and glad-rags of the summer folk"Don't ever study them things too close," she'd say when I could give her a hand. "Just drop them in the tub." So catbrier was my first war, all strands and prongs like bobwire, and some determined. I found you had to go under the ground for it, a net of roots it all shot up from, and sever them with the spade. Though even then it only knotted up and spread, so cutting made it tougher. That was my first jungle, way before my campesinos hacked through green-black walls of vines and leaves that came on thick and fast as a head tide up Duck Creek over there. Men get older and die, my dear, but jungle's always young and full of piss and vinegar Don't quote me exact, I hope! multiplying itself without any rules, packing its spaces with whatever crawls, flies, coughs, sings, screams and smells, improvising to carry itself forward and take back anything looks to it like progress. First time you notice a tree trunk with gray and green up-and-down vertical stripes and it's dangling orange puffballs, why next time those puffballs are purple and growing
Page 3
wooly hair like a Fuzzy Wuzzy and the trunk's running a black sap that will take away patches of your hide if you're unlucky enough to brush against it. Is it the same tree, or another? Things change so fast there's no hope of landmarks to tell you where you are or where you've been. There's fruits cased in husks like spiny blowfish, and growing directly from the bark. Bees the size of my big toe. At times your axe releases perfumes so's you'd think a woman lovely as you are was waiting for you there. Where sunlight penetrates like stain-glass in a church, there's yowling and crashing of jaguars, wild pig, the "padre's she-mule," that young girl turned four-legged animal, the Indians claim, when the priest forced himself on her. Snakes like vines, their heads disguised as flowers, vines like snakes
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