by Ed Skoog
Copper Canyon Press 2009
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

“You think time flies? It falls to earth.”

Ed Skoog’s Mister Skylight opens with “During the War,” which reads like a brief history of Skoog and America.  It is a clear introduction to a collection of poems that is anything but.  On the back cover, the point is made that Skoog worked for years in the basement of a museum. That is how most of his poems feel: image after image, one top of another, all with significance but not always with direct relation to one another. However, with close attention, there is something significant to be taken away from each poem, and the collection as a whole maintains a deep unity through consistency of voice.

There are places where Skoog’s imagery extends beyond rational comprehension, but where the tone remains consistent enough to keep us moving and experiencing.  Lines emerge occasionally from the mass of images to deliver clear, unexpected messages.  For example, in “Party at the Dump,” Skoog writes after almost 30 lines, “Life must be worth something / for the loss of it to hurt so much,” before diving back into another page and a half of conversational, erratic, and sometimes violent imagery:

Take the foreign policy of weather,
palmetto bugs caravanning up the lime tree.
Winds crater power lines, and from these,
an empty and alone beauty busters down,
bullies the shotgun house, keeps a body
up late. Dogs know, the wild ones…

It’s surprising how quickly the writing can come out of the disjointed onslaught of images to brief moments of clarity that extend even to the ‘meta-moment’ of writing a piece of poetry. Take these examples from “Memory Loss”:

When I write “I forgot my silencer”
I mean I have forgotten my silence,
and would like to be thought of
as a dangerous person,
as someone who is intriguing

…

                                                                                 My
fever should have been a prose poem, an entity separated out
and managed in its own tradition rather than asking to find a
place here. They almost reach me. I look up and see blue gels
from theater lights fluttering, caught in cottonwood branches.

The massed images surely have the “museum basement” effect, but each individual poem is also weighed with personal and public history.  In “Ruler of My Heart,” the songs played on a jukebox are secret reminiscences of the long absent; the jukebox itself is fixed and unchanging with its limited playlist.  “The Kansas River, Also Called Kaw” draws out the idea of childhood hopes and promises gone unfulfilled amid the violence of memory. Moreover, the amusements that occupied us as children would never suffice into adulthood.

The closing poems, “Mister Skylight,” and “Postscript: Autobiographical” are dynamic shows of the inevitability of progession.  History is oppressive, weakness is awareness, power is close attention.  Everything is fixed in a mire, overseen by Mr. Skylight (“You think time flies?  It falls to earth”).  This is an excellent collection of poems riding the line between personal expression and public, physical connection.

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