Eight short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and a title that sounds like a dinner menu: "Fricassee" is a dish of food cut into pieces and stewed together. The poem is about how war reaches us now, as a steady supply of commentary, argument and updates that we consume daily, half hoping to be soothed by them. Its central idea is uneasy. Taking in information about violence can feel like understanding it, but the poem suspects that this chewing and swallowing is a way of not facing the thing itself.
The first stanza arrives like an announcement. "Here comes war" is the phrase you might use for a parade, a bus, or a plate carried to the table, and the casual tone is the first unsettling note. What follows is hard to pin down because there is no punctuation. Is "an old order" a description of war itself, something ancient and familiar? Or is it the thing that is "resolving questions / about faction and protest," an established power settling disputes in its own way? The poem never decides. Either reading makes war a tidy solution, a way of closing arguments by ending them, and the bland bureaucratic verbs ("resolving") make that solution sound administrative rather than bloody.
The two-line middle stanza is the poem's pivot and its most compressed moment. "Against the body / a war will not be true" can be read several ways. War may not be truthful when set against the body's reality, since flesh does not lie the way slogans do. Or a war cannot stay faithful to itself once it is measured against actual bodies. The body is the one witness the "old order" cannot argue with. It also sets up the rest of the poem, because the body comes back in the last stanza as the thing that eats.
Here the poem turns domestic. "A fricassee of notions and information / I eat every day / to ease my mind." The fricassee works as a metaphor because it is chopped, mixed and cooked until the separate pieces lose their edges. That describes a news diet well, where facts, opinions and rumours blur into one stew. Because a fricassee is traditionally meat, I also hear a darker undertone, though that is my reading rather than something the poem says. Cut-up pieces on a plate faintly echo what war does to the body in the previous stanza, and the speaker is calmly eating them. The final phrase, "to ease my mind," is bitterly ironic. The mind is soothed by the very material that should disturb it, and the poem lets that contradiction stand without comment.
The sound of the poem quietly links its two halves. "Questions," "faction," "notions" and "information" all share a clipped, hissing *-tion* ending, so the vocabulary of political conflict and the vocabulary of consumption seem to be made of the same stuff. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, but the line lengths do some work. The poem moves in short, plain lines until the fricassee line, by far the longest, which piles up its words as the stew piles up its ingredients. Then it shrinks again to "I eat every day" and "to ease my mind," whose small, flat rhythm sounds like habit. Having no punctuation also forces the reader to do the chopping, deciding where phrases begin and end. The poem is itself a fricassee of fragments.
What makes it worth reading is how much it does in so few words, and how it avoids a lecture. It never says that war is wrong or that the media numbs us. It shows a speaker at a table, comfortable and a little complicit, and leaves readers to notice that the speaker could be them. The poem's honesty lies in admitting that the habit it describes is a comfort, and that comfort is exactly what makes it dangerous.