Review of "Last Call" from Beth Bachmann's first book

Temper by Beth Bachmann won the 2008 Donald Hall Prize in poetry and is a solid debut. The poems in this collection chronicle her sister’s murder from the perspective of an outsider—meaning the one left to wonder where is the sister, what happened, and why?

The poem “Last Call” arrives early in the collection and speaks directly to this unknowing. As the title suggests, the poem focuses on the sister’s last phone call. It’s interesting how one can sense the grasping for answers by the speaker’s latching onto seemingly irrelevant details: what her dad wore when he answered the phone, his truck’s gear shift, the cigarette machine. In this poem, we see what this speaker’s perspective will render and what it can’t: this actual story is unknowable, unsolvable, yet the attempt to understand has no end.

“Last Call” by Beth Bachmann

Come get me. A father in his nightshirt, a daughter on the end of the line
calling for a pickup.

A father in his nightshirt, in his stick shift, switches gears; the pickup
pulls up to the train station.

His stick shift switches gears. She’s not there; he pulls up to the train station
bar, the cigarette machine, pay phone.

She’s not there; he drops change at the bar, the cigarette machine, payphone.
In the freight yard, a body

drops. Change crosses over a face in the freight yard. A body’s
last words

cross over a face: a daughter at the end of the line calling last words,
Come get me.

In an interview online, Bachmann says that she is interested in lyric repetition and boundaries. This makes perfect sense considering the book’s subject matter constantly fights with the boundaries given (life/death; facts/mystery; grief/solace). What I’m interested in is how content and form (and by form I mean the structure the poet chooses, be it received or open) inform one another. Form should never simply be an adherence to a plan but a complement to the emotional concerns of the poem. And that is what I admire about this poem and its lyric repetition.

On first read, one barely notices the intense repetition, but simply feels caught in a worry-loop: where is she? where is she? where is she…? The obvious repetition is the refrain come get me—chilling because of the change in meaning it takes from beginning to end. The first use is a daughter not asking, but demanding Dad who is in for the night to “come get me”. By the end, it has turned into a plead—and avoids being overly dramatic because it is actually the last words the father hears. That repetition is the easy one to latch onto. But a lot more is going on.

Below I’ve put in bold how each stanza repeats phrases in a specific pattern; stanzas one and two are united, three and four, and so on:

“Last Call” by Beth Bachmann

Come get me. A father in his nightshirt, a daughter on the end of the line
calling for a pickup.

A father in his nightshirt, in his stickshift, switches gears; the pickup
pulls up to the train station.

His stick shift switches gears. She’s not there; he pulls up to the train station
bar, the cigarette machine, pay phone.

She’s not there; he drops change at the bar, the cigarette machine, payphone.
In the freight yard, a body

drops. Change crosses over a face in the freight yard. A body’s
last words

cross over a face: a daughter at the end of the line calling last words,
Come get me.

There is even more repetition beyond stanzas numbered 1-2, 3-4, and 5-6; repetition also occurs within the stanzas numbered 6-1, 2-3, 4-5. (All these stanzas are adjacent, too, which creates an even greater sense of repetition, obsession—and I would also suggest terror in the sense of being caught in something that cannot be escaped.)

Come get me. A father in his nightshirt, a daughter on the end of the line
calling for a pickup.

A father in his nightshirt, in his stickshift, switches gears; the pickup
pulls up to the train station.

His stick shift switches gears. She’s not there; he pulls up to the train station
bar, the cigarette machine, pay phone.

She’s not there; he drops change at the bar, the cigarette machine, payphone.
In the freight yard, a body

drops. Change crosses over a face in the freight yard. A body’s
last words

cross over a face: a daughter at the end of the line calling last words,
Come get me.

I’m highlighting this repetition to emphasize how much is being repeated—yet when one reads the poem, it feels seamless—conversational almost. What’s more, this pattern is not simply a pattern, but one that reinforces the tone and argument of the piece—a narrative without an end, an unanswerable dilemma of what happened and why, a narrator replaying the same pieces of known information hoping for something: insight, knowledge, consolation. No elegy, or perhaps I should say no American elegy, operates without a sense of hope. The hope may seem far buried here, but the hopefulness is found in the attempt to understand, in the attempt to communicate, and in the belief—reinforced with the repetition—that answers or consolation will come if one keeps trying.

For more on Beth Bachmann, check out her Web site at: www.bethbachmann.com
(“Last Call” was first published in Prairie Schooner)