Review of David Lazar, “Muse of Brooklyn: I Would Never Study but in My Dreams” from Don’t Look Now: Things We Wish We Hadn’t Seen, Ed. Kristen Iversen and David Lazar, 207-12.  Columbus, OH: Mad Creek Press, 2020. 

David Lazar’s “Muse of Brooklyn” is a lyrical and enigmatic piece.  Not long, but deep – death and its recollections.  I was caught off guard by its ethereal language.  The title suggested to me something concrete; I guess that’s how I think of Brooklyn, a place with boundaries demarcated on a map and filled with beginnings, middles, and endings. 

Lazar begins with a short enumeration of the things he wishes he hadn’t seen, namely the dead in their caskets – a father, a mother, a chair of his department (another parent figure?).  But these are his waking sights when his mother is dead.  The essay turns more to his sleeping memories, his dreams.  He describes the cycle of being awake with a dead mother, and then falling asleep to revive his mother, who is always alive in his dreams, only to awaken again to a dead mother.  Lazar attributes this experience to a lack of proper mourning – “Clearly mourning has not become me enough, at least subconsciously, so that I can let my mother go (211)” – as if his mother is unburied, a wandering shade on the shores of the Styx, asking in this case not to be buried but to be let go, to pass over.

The narrator in one dream even descends into that underworld to retrieve his mother, Orpheus like (209).  He describes waking from that dream suddenly, not quite getting to where he was trying to go, dream’s disappointment.  The feeling of “being wrenched / being violently transported / having lost something (210).  These lines and several others are written line by line, as if in a poem.  This is fitting, as the essay is poetic, both in its lyrical language and in its overt nod to poetry (Is there a Muse for the non-fiction essay?).  Lazar quotes some lines from Wright’s “To the Muse.”  But Lazar’s language itself is striking in its own ways.  He incorporates words from French; I particularly liked his use of frissons – thrills.  “Livelihood” is reclaimed from simply meaning “way of making a living” to meaning animating the dead, the life the dead can acquire in dreams, though I would like to extend its meaning beyond dreams. 

At times, I felt the essay was too self-aware, such as when he writes, “Scholars of my work will have to mark it, perhaps here, with an asterisk (208).”  That’s clever in its way, but in an essay filled with learned references, foreign words and poetic quotations, it struck me as a little too learned.  Nonetheless, I did put an asterisk where I was told to.