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FABRIC

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Richard Froude

February 2011

Michael Flatt

One could describe Richard Froude’s FABRIC as a meditation on memory presented in prose poetry, but this description would elide too many deeply interesting facets of the work. While working from the basis of a consideration of memory’s inherent virtues and flaws, FABRIC creates a space within that consideration for the inspired moment. By “inspired,” I mean several things: the invented, the possibly mistaken, the obsessive, and the associative.

One could describe Richard Froude’s FABRIC as a meditation on memory presented in prose poetry, but this description would elide too many deeply interesting facets of the work. While working from the basis of a consideration of memory’s inherent virtues and flaws, FABRIC creates a space within that consideration for the inspired moment. By “inspired,” I mean several things: the invented, the possibly mistaken, the obsessive, and the associative.

What binds and determines the mood of this material is Froude’s matter-of-fact tone. Froude continuously deploys frank statements of fact, or at least, statements that are presented so frankly, they are given the appearance of fact. When his vignettes consist of very believable, seemingly autobiographical anecdotes, his tone is the same as when they consist of pseudo-surreal narratives. Take the following extract:

When my sister was born in 1982, I was given a plastic machine gun. The gun was wrapped in Union Jack wrapping paper. In the hospital, there was a woman with a yellow cast on her leg. Perhaps that was a different hospital.

Here, it would appear that we are being presented with factual information, to the best of the speaker’s ability, provided the inherent flaws of memory. Yet, when the speaker slips into a more poetic mode, his tone remains the same, allowing for the slippage from a representational register to a non-representational one to be rather subtle: “Alfred leads me down a path lined with pink rhododendron. He has led me this way before. Before a yew tree we stop at the bust of a gorilla. Its name is Alfred. We stare at it for days.”

These types of moments necessarily call into question what the reader felt safe in presuming was “true.” Perhaps this reinforces what one character tells us, that “‘truth’ is the name we give to lies we can’t live without.” Though, the speaker tells this character, likely an imaginary figment, “to go fuck himself,” and with regard to the truth being nothing but an acceptable lie, I’m inclined to a similar imperative.

Nonetheless, the third category of “fact” that exists in FABRIC, in addition to the lived and the imagined, is also rendered suspect by these imagined moments. This is the researched fact, which may represent a sort of antipode to the lived experience but occupy an adjacent room in memory’s architecture. These facts are juxtaposed with the lived and imagined facts, and provide a cobbled foundation for memory’s creaky house:

Prior to 1949, vehicle safety tests were performed almost exclusively with the dead. Aside from more familiar automobile based tests, these early experiments involved pitching corpses down an elevator shaft, dropping steel weights onto their skulls.

This brings us to what I would say is the book’s primary obsession: death. This subject, perhaps inspired by Froude’s volunteer work at local hospices, pervades FABRIC, from the first page, where the speaker states, “I’ve often wondered which season I’d prefer to die in. Which day of the week.” The book’s third section, “The Dashes,” is inspired by the prayer book of a (real? invented?) soldier killed in World War I, the aforementioned Alfred. The fourth section, “Oceanography,” is centered on a narrative of the speaker’s attendance of a relative’s funeral as a child.

The constant presence of thoughts about death colors moments that would not otherwise strike one as necessarily related to the topic. Immediately following the first scene of the funeral in “Oceanography,” Froude writes, “This is what I think ‘submersion’ means: one field’s absolute disappearance within another.” In the context of a funeral, the idea of submersion is almost unavoidable, though Froude’s speaker seems to reflect on this word in passing, the way one might many years later, unconscious that this thought sprang from the previous moment’s thought about a funeral attended as a child.

In this way, FABRIC tracks the movement of the creative mind (meaning, of course, any mind), which does not experience memories as plastic-wrapped, vacuum-sealed moments, but rather as mellifluous psychological events enmeshed and shot through with every other category of thought.

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