The Endarkenment

“Endarkenment” is one of those strange words that doesn’t really seem to mean anything. Taken literally, it’s the opposite of enlightenment, but as Jeffrey McDaniel demonstrates in the epigraph to his new collection of poems, even that definition can be stretched to include a few different things.

It can be a way of looking at the world illogically, or a particularly miserable state of being. It’s a word that can mean entirely different things to different people, and as a result, it starts to mean very little.

McDaniel, a Philadelphia slam poet, is used to dealing with this kind of lexical ambiguity. Most of the time, he manipulates it to his own advantage. In his older work, he often stretches words and metaphors to extremes, sometimes to humorous effect but mostly as a way to point out the strangeness of human thoughts and relationships. He’s still doing that, but now he’s more interested in the flexibility—and sometimes fallibility—of the words themselves.

The poems that comprise The Endarkenment, like McDaniel’s previous work, are packed with clever wordplay, metaphors, and similes. They work best, though, when McDaniel is conscious of what he’s doing. In “Good,” for instance, he finds fifteen ways to use the title word, each with a subtly different meaning. It’s funny, and awe-inspiring in a way, but mostly it’s a reminder of how much meaning can be packed into a single word, and how much we can misinterpret or miss entirely when we’re not paying close attention.

This isn’t to say that McDaniel is interested in figurative language for its own sake. Instead, he uses poetry as a means for retelling simple, elegant stories. “Summer of Stationary Road Trips” is one of these. McDaniel captures the dizziness of young love by placing it in the context of idle drug use. “You lean over,” he explains, “snort one of her limbs into your head, where it shreds into confetti.” In “morning walk, 43 hours without sleep,” he describes his surroundings with a similar blend of literal and figurative terms, and in doing so, paints the world as a more complex, more interesting place.

At the heart of this collection is McDaniel’s need to explain not just where he’s come from, but where he is now. “And now I’m thirty-five,” he says in “The Quicksand Hourglass,” “can see the life that’s ahead of me, the life behind me.” He uses his poetry to touch on a history of family drug abuse and dysfunction, and his fears for the future. All of this is captured in the briefly brilliant title poem, where he tackles his frustration with words and family and his own weirdness, and comes up with the book’s best line: “I know the glass is half full, but it’s a shot glass, and there are four of us, and we’re all very thirsty.” It is appropriately dark and self-pitying, but also deeply penetrating.

McDaniel’s poetry seems unremarkable at first, but his sharp, hidden insights compensate for the lack of fireworks that fans of other slam poets might expect. It’s a clever reversal of the problem set up in his title—here, what at first seems insignificant begins to mean something to everyone—and, ultimately, makes for a good read. -Aku Ammah Tagoe