Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s “Radical Neck” is a powerful elegy that resists sentimentality, exploring the complexities of memory, grief, and the destructive nature of addiction. The poem moves through time, piecing together images of the father through sensory recollections, habit, and bodily decay, shaping him into both a mythic and a deeply human figure. Structured in a fragmented yet fluid manner, it mirrors the process of remembering—how certain details become sharper, others blur, and how grief does not follow a linear path. The poem’s title refers to a radical neck dissection, a brutal medical procedure undertaken in the final stages of the father’s life, but it also suggests something deeply transgressive about the poem itself: its refusal to conform to an expected arc of mourning.

Hicok opens with an image of fire—a match lighting the father’s hands—drawing immediate attention to the theme of smoking, which serves as both a physical act and a symbolic marker of identity. The flickering light of the match is compared to the prehistoric cave paintings of Cosquer, invoking a sense of ritual and continuity. The father’s smoking becomes a kind of modern-day hunting magic, a deeply ingrained behavior that links him to vanished traditions, to something elemental and ancient. The imagery of smoke entering the lungs as a “ghost of plants” suggests both a return to the earth and an eerie foreshadowing of death. The line “One Camel down, nineteen to go” is casual yet haunting, emphasizing both the habitual nature of his smoking and the inevitable tally toward self-destruction.

Memory moves fluidly in this poem, shifting to a train ride to St. Louis, where the father is seen standing, smoking, pointing at a collapsing barn on the horizon. The detail of men once wearing hats, now replaced by tattoos, places the father within a generational shift, subtly reinforcing the passage of time. His smoking is described as a rhythmic gesture, syncing with the movement of the train, a kind of small ritual folded into the larger rhythms of life. When he returns to his seat, he seems “larger,” as if he has absorbed something from the landscape itself, reinforcing his connection to the world around him even as his addiction isolates him from it.

Hicok abruptly introduces a line from Shakespeare: “The skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once.” This reference from Hamlet speaks directly to the theme of death and decay but also underscores the tragic irony of the father’s condition. He will lose his tongue to cancer, stripped of speech, his voice reduced to “esophageal churnings.” The question of how to address the dead arises—“Dear sir. Beloved though rotted man.”—expressing both reverence and discomfort. The father is conjured not just through language but through remembered actions, small domestic gestures: the careful way he tied his shoes, the “wrist-snap of Zippo top,” his fingerprints on the lighter, each detail emphasizing the physicality of memory. These mundane rituals, once insignificant, now become sacred, the only tangible remnants of his presence.

The poem shifts into a philosophical reflection on the imperfection around which memory crystallizes. “A crystal will only form around a speck, an imperfection,” Hicok writes, suggesting that grief itself forms around the flawed, fractured pieces of the past. The father is both comforting and intrusive, appearing suddenly in the form of another man’s laughter in a restaurant, his presence materializing and then slipping away. The speaker acknowledges the futility of chasing these ghosts—“yet he’s done with me”—a realization that grief does not grant closure but instead perpetually cycles through recollection and loss.

The brutality of the title phrase, “Radical neck,” emerges in the starkest section of the poem. The father undergoes a radical dissection, losing his jaw, lymph nodes, and tongue. At the VA hospital, men who have undergone similar procedures are called “half-heads, chop-blocks,” reducing them to their surgical wounds. Hicok does not flinch from the grotesque realities of disease and medical intervention. He recalls visiting with the intention of staring, of trying to grasp some last vestige of the father’s identity, only to find himself looking away, distracted by the surrounding landscape, the motion of trees, the surface of a pond. The father, despite his condition, continues smoking, a reflex that has outlived speech, health, and reason. The image of smoke “escaping the tube” becomes a chilling metaphor for persistence, for addiction as something stronger than the will to live.

The poem circles back to childhood, where smoke was something enchanting, something that “adored him, clung to, stroked his face.” Tobacco brands are named—Raleigh, Chesterfield, Lark—offering a nostalgic, almost musical quality, an intimacy tied to scent and sensation. Even ashtrays become symbols of childhood wonder, shaped like Buddhas, crowns, spaceships. Yet the beauty of these images is undercut by the ever-present cough, the “second voice” that follows the father, the constant refrain of people—his wife, his son, doctors—urging him to stop. Smoking is no longer a neutral act but a fatal force, something that fuses to his skin, becomes indistinguishable from him.

The final lines are brutal in their directness. Asked what should be done with the father’s body, the speaker replies, “burn him, make him ash.” It is an act of both revenge and love, a recognition that the father, in some ways, has already chosen this fate. His lifelong relationship with fire and smoke finds its inevitable conclusion in cremation. The phrasing—short, clipped—rejects sentimentality. It is a moment of stark finality, reducing years of conflict, habit, and love into something elemental.

Throughout “Radical Neck,” Hicok’s style is fluid and associative, shifting between lyricism and blunt realism. The poem refuses a straightforward narrative arc, instead layering memories, reflections, and medical horror in a way that mirrors the nonlinear process of grief. The father emerges as both an individual and a symbol—of addiction, of masculinity, of a lost era. He is mythic in one moment, painfully human in the next. Smoking, once a gesture of casual ritual, becomes an unstoppable force, a presence that lingers even after the body is gone.

Ultimately, the poem does not offer easy resolution. The father persists in the mind of the speaker, in the residue of memory, in the very structure of the poem itself. “Radical Neck” does not merely recount loss; it enacts it, allowing the father to slip away, return, slip away again. What remains is not just grief but an unshakable intimacy, a recognition that the dead continue speaking—not in words, but in the traces they leave behind.

Copyright (c) 2025 PoetryExplorer

Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!

Other Poems of Interest...