Enter Dark Stranger

About

The world of William Trowbridge is one preoccupied with loss, with the fall from some possibility of grace that all who are born must bear. In the title poem of Trowbridge’s first full-length collection the poet calls our attention to movies, to Shane in particular. He asks us to identify, not with Shane, the lonely knight on a nameless quest, but with the much more lonely, and real, Jack Palance, the Prince of Darkness.

Trowbridge favors the villain, the outcast, the imperfect, the sinner, the alienated: King Kong, the Frog Prince, Frankenstein’s monster.

Reviews

“Combining the sense of life of James Wright with the satire of Kurt Vonnegut, William Trowbridge reveals the grotesque beneath the commonplace: ‘Think of Karloff’s monster,/full of lonely love but too hideous/to bear.’ Sparkling poems ‘full of lonely love’ search behind the Halloween mask of terror (the ‘dark stranger’) for the meaning of the American landscape. Trowbridge’s sophisticated eye records the excesses of pop culture and ‘normal’ American provincial life with obsessive deadpan. His snapshots of social reality embody something tragicomic. Searching ‘the old neighborhoods for clues: initials in a sidewalk, / a rusty nail pounded in a tree, a wish still floating / near the school,’ Trowbridge is a dispassionate and superb recorder in the tradition of Sherwood Anderson.”
—Frank Allen, Poet Lore, Winter 1990-91

“In the sequence of Kong poems, Kong asks our indulgence. The comedy is the sentimental one of the monster humanized; we recognize that in suffering we wear a mask, and that mask protects, perhaps distances, the person behind it from the pain of the persona. There may be an awful unease in our response; in amusement we are aware we cannot hate Kong, for there is nothing funny about someone we genuinely hate (Hitler, say). But on some level the poet asks us to identify with the power he exercises in adopting the persona. (The unease may be akin to our response at the movies, when Jolson or Irene Dunne suddenly appear in blackface.) The identification between the poet and the persona may be closer than is comfortable for laughs; it should be clear, for instance, that a large part of Randy Newman’s effectiveness when he takes on the persona of a good ole boy is that he is an L.A. Jew taking on the persona. To the extent that we are likely to see the identification between poet and persona as close, we will feel, if we are that person’s victim, the blurry self-censure of our indulgence rather than the fierce entreaching of stable irony. It might do, then, merely to note that in each Kong poem the conceit is applied to a different moment of the white male purview: ‘Kong Looks Back on His Tryout with the Bears,’ ‘Having Thought Better of a Shootout, Kong Consents to Rhumba Lessons,’ ‘Kong Turns Critic,’ ‘Kong Answers the Call for a Few Good Men,’ ‘Viet Kong,’ etc. One reads Enter Dark Stranger fondly; it is in the grain.”
—Jeff Hamilton, Black Warrior Review, Fall/Winter, 1990

“In this collection of 44 poems, in three sections, Trowbridge is offering a portrait of the Midwest familiar enough to those of us who live here. The unadulterated image is not complimentary. But he is not trying to create an atmosphere comprehensible only to those from Missouri (Trowbridge’s residence), or Illinois, or Iowa. And his poems are not esoteric; indeed, they are largely understood at a surface level, while underlying subtleties reinforce first impressions. Trowbridge writes for all of us, though each poem is nevertheless a personal expression, a muffled cry of wonder. Beginning the collection is ‘Stark Weather,’ which describes how nature challenges each of us to not only survive, but survive willingly. Thrown by the winds and weather, one emotion is as good as another; ‘a pistol shot sounds/no louder than a screen door/slapping on a porch.’ Trowbridge starts with the familiar, then eases into his point. He, unlike many poets, is not afraid of humor. The entire second section consists of poems devoted to King Kong in absurd situations, from Kong taking rumba lessons, to trying to act, to joining the army. Each poem describes a scene that appears quite normal, until we remember that this is King Kong we’re reading about. Trowbridge plays on our forgetfulness, so that the last few lines are always a surprise, and always very funny: ‘I ate/the man first, then the woman, both stringy, but then what’s not these days.'”
—Anita Tarr, The Pikestaff Forum, Spring, 1991

“This is a profound and remarkable work. Trowbridge has uncanny insight into the worlds of the insane, the disappointed, the violent and the fearful. He seems to intuit and remember every life form that is imaginable, or that has brushed his own. He also understands that aspects of the metamorphizing self are their own life forms. In his own voice he speaks with authority as one who is young, old, and most effectively, middle-aged. Trowbridge enables us to face the fear of difference without revulsion by pushing that fear so far that it disperses in a wind of laughter. His exacting spirit gives us the wet hopes and dry truths that we crave, in a literary landscape that is awash with easy sympathies.”
—Bette Tomlinson, New Letters, January, 1990

“Trowbridge has rare comic gifts, so much so that on the present American poetic landscape, where you can travel for days without laughing out loud, he is a walking oxymoron: a funny poet. I don’t mean to belabor this, but how often does a reader of the major American poetry journals get to laugh with a poem in wickedly happy delight?”
—Richard Simpson, Tar River Poetry, Rall, 1989

“Trowbridge has the special skill of being able to take the tragic events of personal life and by superimposing comic undercurrents somehow relieve the burden of guilt and shame and fear we all, as human beings, must share. He seems to be obsessed with injustices and ‘all things that call us back to the world of imperfection.’ Yet with a touch of irony and skepticism, sarcasm and empathy, he speaks with conviction of a need for love, allegiance and fair play, recognizing with respect and understanding the foibles of old age and the kind of senility that glamorizes the past, bringing to fruition the dreams that were aborted in the realities of life. Trowbridge brings the reader to contemplation of the human condition as we all experience it. My advice is to read Enter Dark Stranger—aloud, if possible.
—Margaret McGuire, Arkansas Gazette, June 25, 1989

“Trowbridge’s world is one preoccupied with loss, with the fall from some possibility of grace that all who are born in sin must bear. He is with the villain, the outcast, the imperfect, the sinner, the alienated one. These poems, all comic but with Trowbridge’s undercurrent of isolation running through them, are a success.
—Leon Stokesbury, The Chattahoochee Review, Summer, 1989

“. . . stunning first poetry collection. . . . These poems are howlingly nasty and perfectly executed. . . . Trowbridge’s weapons are a deep puzzlement of feeling and a wonderful ear; he knows how to divert with jokes while he’s about to attack: ‘BLAM BLAM BLAM!'”
—San Francisco Chronicle

Praise

“Enter Dark Stranger is a fine book. The poems show a consistently high level of craftsmanship and are evenly thoughtful, mature and—I mean this as high praise—genuinely readable. … Overall, the best analogue would be Nemerov, for the mingling of satire and wit with lyrical feeling. … The Kong poems are a jewel. In this character Trowbridge has found a delicious satiric voice, often as keenly painful as it is comic.”
—Robert Wallace