Empire's End by Peter F. Crowley

  Before I jump into a review of Empire’s End by Peter F. Crowley, I should explain how it came into my hands. Recently, I took a trip to Boston and when I go on vacation, I try to buy a poetry collection by a local poet as a souvenir, of sorts. I was lucky to discover that Boston has a book store that focuses exclusively on poetry: The Grolier Poetry Book Shop, which is coming up on a century of existence. I loved seeing thousands and thousands of poetry books on floor-to-ceiling shelves in a cramped room (in my estimate, max occupancy is approximately 5). Amid those shelves was one labelled “Local Authors”, so I went about my perusal and the design of Crowley’s book stood out. And so it came home with me.

Crowley’s collection tackles contemporary issues, including the January 6th insurrection, the rise of AI technologies, and the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. There’s a clear political impulse here to critique, among other things, capitalist exploitation and toxic work cultures, but it Crowley maintains a poetic impulse that is sometimes lost on more overtly political works. Crowley borders the line of being bombastic, but more often than not veers into the surreal, offering strange connections or unusual imagery to help evoke a response.

As a result, readers are left with two choices for Empire’s End: to root oneself in the images and do the tough work of parsing them, or to let the poems fly by and try to claw your way to a touchstone. I admit that I was mostly in the latter camp, focusing on the big ideas and repeated motifs (Crowley loves eyelids, for instance), with an occasional poem forcing me to linger.

Let’s examine, for a moment, the poem “Dreamless.” It begins with two words on two lines: “plateau-eyed / wasteland.” There’s a kind of deadness to open the scene. Then, in a new stanza, a new start seems to emerge: “shades utter minced light / eyes crawl from bed / the bathroom’s barren walls / reach into flesh, / asking it to sing. / The flesh has been gorged, / leaving entrails / in the night’s imploding eclipse // And the mirror / is a wasteland” (37). The agency of the scene is largely ascribed to the environment, but the thing being acted upon is often unclear. Shades let the light in, almost conspiratorially. Then “eyes crawl” from the bed and the “bathroom’s barren walls / reach into flesh”—but whose flesh? The idea of an “imploding eclipse” is also a challenge, an inversion inverted. Ultimately, perhaps it’s the mirror that is being acted upon, taking everything into view. The consequences of the scene are less clear. The scene is evocative, but it doesn’t really demand that I sit with it because I’m not clear on the significance of the scene to a speaker or human entity.

There is another poem that potentially illuminates this one. In “Coming to”, a prose-poem that ends with a stanza that reads as follows:

Sometimes, as he gains self-consciousness and an understanding of surroundings, I have a déjà-vu of traveling the same path, stumbling, tripping and not knowing but, with maple syrup slowness, gaining a sense of things before losing it all again, on days when the sky does not share” (47).

The passage sets up an episteme that seems place-centered. “Self-consciousness,” taken literally as awareness of oneself, emerges alongside an “understanding of surroundings.” Further, there’s a sense of memory attached to place—the speaker is “traveling the same path,” but even when the path is the same, it is fraught with error—”stumbling, tripping and not knowing.” In a sense, Empire’s End offers such landscapes that are at once familiar, though they remain difficult to traverse. The landscape-poems demand “maple syrup slowness” and, once parsed, it appears that the speaker gains “a sense of things before losing it all again,” just like the reader. Each poem is a new challenge that emerges. In reference to the previous poem, though, where there does not appear to be a human cognition of significance, here Crowley refers to “days when the sky does not share,” establishing the primacy of the environment over the speaker. Perhaps that is the key to “Dreamless,” offered as a touchstone in “Coming to.”

I admit that I have some suspicions of what Crowley is up to, but much of his work remains oblique to me, so I rely on such touchstone poems. I’ll refer to a poem late in the collection simply titled “The good poem.” It’s possible that the title is intended ironically, but for the sake of argument let’s assume that Crowley is sincere. The first stanza seems to illustrate Crowley’s writing ambitions and dramatize them in a short eight lines. The first stanza offers the wild juxtapositions, imagery, and political impulses that propel his work: “An angelic blossom consuming the night / A lark performing trapeze acts / A servant killing their master / A fruit devolved into seed” (75). The second stanza takes a different turn: “Knowing that the woodrat’s ripped out throat could’ve been you! / To know birth is an accident and life absurd. / To live with this buried in neural pockets of ghost-formed words. / To transfer to paper the universal thousand-pound cinderblock weight” (75). The final line about transferring a thousand-pound cinderblock weight to paper implies to me a deep pain that needs to be dealt with. The “ghost-formed words” seem to suggest a meaninglessness to language, but the contrast of the pain being placed into words on the page is an effective elevation, however tenuous, of the poetic project. It implies that the violence and unfairness of the previous lines can be dealt with through the poems.

The dark cynicism the pieces comes through elsewhere, sometimes in the form of questions. In the poem “Older corrosion,” the central premise is clear: “When we get older, we corrode” (59). The rest of the poem discusses our decay and the impulse to preserve ourselves. If there were a way to pass ourselves on or extend ourselves without corrosion, it seems tempting. The Utopic sort of ideal quickly takes a dark turn, pointedly offered through two juxtaposed questions: “What of the pigs, whose heads were severed, / though kept alive for hours post-mortem? // But should our dead selves be forever curated / On our daughters and grandsons’ backs?” (60). These questions point towards the darkness in our impulse for longevity, especially with reference to the pigs, presumably subject to the will of human beings. If we are in the same position of captivity and imprisonment, what value is there in prolonging our existence? And, even if we were successful, is it right to force the subsequent generations to curate our lives? Even in the metaphorical sense, is it right for the past to be shouldered by the next generations? It’s a provocative set of questions that seem to imply their own answer, however darkly.

To conclude, let’s examine for a moment the collection’s namesake as a final sample of Crowley’s work. Here is the first stanza of “Empire’s End”:

It is the end of empire.
I walk in circles around
my block like an amnesiac,
avoiding people like the plague.
Our hospitals held in
ransom to tomahawk missiles
and silent-blooded drones,
at last, get a trickle.

We can see the political consciousness that impels the poems on full display here: reference to empire, avoiding people “like the plague” during covid-times, the reference to hospitals and tomahawk missiles (like in Palestine, perhaps?), and so on. The second stanza repeats the idea of empire coming to an end, noting that “Truth died long ago — / if indeed it ever lived” and “today we believe anything: / That an apple ate the sky / That a pear has eyes” (15). In the third stanza, Crowley reference the end of war alongside the end of empire, the sense of privation that comes along with aggression: a return to paradise. Immediately after suggesting a paradise, though, Crowley suggests that it was a “huckster” that “unmasked the entire charade.” In this references to post-truth life and the charade of a paradise we didn’t really have, I can’t help but feel a connection to a certain president with an antediluvian slogan. It results in, in Crowley’s words, an “unmasking.” The end of empire still retains its darkness. Even without empire, there is darkness. In the final stanza, Crowley notes of the unmasking: 

But first there is a steep fall,
like a drunk collapsing
on shards of glass.
No longer is the horror over there.
And when awakening from corona
with power inebriation dissipated:
things are far different


it is the end of empire. (16)

I suppose there is much to discuss in terms of the final lines: “things are far different // it is the end of empire” (16). I can’t help but sense a certain irony here. All of the supposedly generative capacities of empires have faded away, and what is left? More of the same—perhaps as though empire is never about its generative capacity. Despite all of the “awakening from corona” that took place, I can’t help but feel that things both are and aren’t different. As though we’ve reverted to a previous reality, as though whether empire exists or not is immaterial.

Despite the bleak revelations sometimes offered in the poems, I can’t help but think that there’s an optimism at the core of the poetic project. I feel like if we were truly defeated we would not write poems about our concerns. We write only when there is something to be done, that the poems can mean something—can take action. So, with that in mind, I’d encourage you to give Crowley’s poems a chance and then take to the streets to liberate yourself and others from the tyranny of empires.

Stay strong and imagine the possibilities. Happy reading!