Posts Tagged ‘David Sewell’

Thin Kimono

Monday, December 20th, 2010

by Michael Earl Craig
Wave Books 2010
Reviewed by David Sewell

“I wish now to speak plainly about a one-eyed horse.”

I have never read The Da Vinci Code, which I don’t mean to present to you here as an advertisement of my suitability for mating. Or perhaps I do, though I don’t want to give the impression that that’s the only reason I’m mentioning it. But, anyway, having lived in Paris for almost two years now and having seen groups of tourists lugging that estimable work all across this fair city, it occurs to me that the twain must have some connection. It’s possible I could validate this hunch with a few clicks on the computer machine and some time surfing the world wide web, but my ironic coolness depends on my not really knowing, and my ironic coolness is very important, not only to me, but to forces far greater in scope, coherence, and personal hygiene—forces, for all of our sakes, I dare not mention here. So let’s just assume the tourists are not misguided, other than in a sartorial sense, and keep this journey of discovery steaming along.

Slowly, and then somewhat more quickly, then, strangely, slowly again, it occurred to me that my being in Paris, the book-toting tourists’ being here, the deictic opus’s being set here (as far as I know), and my being asked to write a review of a new poetry collection…it was all starting to add up to something. I needed to focus my eyes, or perhaps let them go out of focus completely, or perhaps I just needed a stiff drink, and then what exactly had been carefully hidden out of my view for so long, the big secret that would make all of this make sense would be revealed, like Lindsay Lohan’s underpants as she emerges from the backseat of a chauffeured sedan.

I discovered the path through this forest of intrigue around 1 a.m. one night, walking home through the darkest evening of the year, rain filling up the streets, somewhere near the Louvre, after staying out past the Metro shutting down and having no cab fare after spending all my money on research materials. I had miles to go before I could sleep, so might as well exercise the old cerebrum along with the legs. If you have read TDC, as the cool kids call it, it might be useful at this point for you to think of whichever character is the sandalwood-smelling, furiously handsome one, and imagine me as him. Or him as me—it is really the same thing. I am your hero. Please keep that in mind as we move forward. The fate of all humanity now and in the future could very well depend on it.

Anyway, speaking of reading effluvia, if you’ve ever passed your eyes over any of the handful of reviews I’ve written for this site, I’m frankly surprised that you’re still reading this now. You see, the me that writes poetry reviews is a bit of a dandy, a fancy-pants who pretends to write reviews nominally about the book in consideration but mainly spends an unwarranted amount of time trying to show off some notion of je ne sais quoi, or mateability, that, in the end, really should have been kept concealed beneath the proverbial trench coat. (If, on the other hand, you find yourself captivated by my tarty insouciance and florid scratching style, please do yourself a favor and check out my multivolume doctoral dissertation on the role of trouser pleats in nineteenth-century Romantic poetry, available at some of the finer university libraries in Bhutan and Turkmenistan.)

You might notice, for instance, that we are more than six hundred words into this very review and I’ve yet to say anything even remotely substantive about the book, such as its title or the author’s name. You don’t need me to tell you that life is like that sometimes—not so much a box of chocolates as a long walk home at 1 a.m., with the recurring urge to knock a fellow night denizen off his velocipede as he cycles by, then pedal quickly away, whisking yourself safely home, where there is never a shortage of research materials or anyone telling you you’ve had enough research for one night and will be given no more, or if there is, you are certainly more powerful than her and her puny girl arms. But that is tea for another time, as the man says.

It is at this point that you are probably thinking that the review of the book will begin, but I’m sorry to inform you, dear reader, that is not quite the case. I haven’t even laid out the bare facts of the Da Vinci Code–like case we have on our hands here, the revelation of which I’m sure will shock and excite you in, hopefully, unequal measures. Here it goes: Michael Earl Craig, the putative author of Thin Kimono, goes authorially by three first names, any of which may or may not be his own. Such a situation is unusual in today’s go-go times of acronyms, initializations, and abbreviations, especially as his friends seem to refer to him as Earl (full disclosure: I would like to be his friend). There are any number of reasons why this might be the case, the most prominent of which is that his nom de plume (and, perhaps, de vie) is a sly, tripartite homage to (1) Philip Michael Thomas (also three first names), noted thespian best known for his smoldering turn as Ricardo Tubbs in the ’80s romantic comedy Miami Vice; (2) the Earl of Sandwich or the Second Earl Grey, or possibly both (thus totaling three Earls); and (3) Craig T.(heodore) Nelson (three first names again), noted coach. I once had a Miami Vice Trapper Keeper, every day I eat exactly one sandwich and drink exactly one pot of Earl Grey tea, and one time I saw Mr. Nelson at the airport… This is starting to get spooky.

There is yet another layer at work here, revealed to me late one night after doing extensive research in my kitchen by the light of the moon. You see, no sane individual would ever believe that anyone would say or write a name as long as Michael Earl Craig’s these days. As a thoroughly mateable and ironically cool person, I’m privy to the knowledge that the cool kids nowadays write and say, in their sexting sessions and such, “MEC,” when referring to our mysterious author. Fine, you might be saying to your wife or prostitute or butler, so what? Well, did you know, smart guy, that mec is a word in French, which by some strange coincidence is the official language of the country I currently live in? Weird, I know. And it’s not just any word, either. In French, mec is roughly equivalent to dude in English. (Need I remind you of the original definition of dude—“a non-westerner or city-dweller who tours or stays in the west of the U.S.”—and that Michael Earl Craig was born in the thriving metropolis of Dayton, Ohio, and now summers and winters, as well as springs and falls, in the wild west?)

Cleverly, our thrice-forenamed author has revealed to us his true identity: the dude. A crucial document in the corpus of mysterious symbology behooving us to consider it is the 1998 historical documentary The Big Lebowski, which followed the comings and goings of a Renaissance man and bowling enthusiast who also went by the name of The Dude. Here is some introductory prose from that film, which sums up that dude’s presence rather succinctly:

“…He called himself The Dude. Now, Dude, that’s a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But, then, there was a lot about The Dude that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But, then again, maybe that’s why I found the place so durned innarestin’…. I only mention it ’cause, sometimes there’s a man—I won’t say a hee-ro, ’cause what’s a hee-ro? But sometimes there’s a man…. And I’m talkin’ about The Dude here—sometimes there’s a man who, well, he’s the man for his time ’n’ place, he fits right in there—and that’s The Dude…. Sometimes there’s a man…. Sometimes there’s a man. Ah, I lost my train of thought here. But… Aw, hell. I done introduced him enough.”

Indeed. Sometimes there’s a man… Sometimes there’s a man in Montana who shoes horses and writes unadorned poems about extraordinary ordinary things, and all the time this is a good thing for the rest of us. The poems in Thin Kimono (as in his previous two books), for the most part, eschew the sudden jumps or shifts in tone, style, placement, or focus that so many poets today hop around on like a crippled albino being chased by a tiger, perhaps also albino. (The second section, of three, is one long, sectioned poem mostly comprising unconnected images and thoughts presented in somewhat non-sequitur fashion. But there’s plenty of emotional/tonal glue here, and it works.) Most of the poems’ images, lines, and thoughts follow what came before in a natural yet not-obvious way. Nearly everything is connected in a logical and emotional sense. This is sometimes called accessibility. Indeed, even the detours are easy to manage—they feel like normal cognitive diversions, following the mind as it follows a tangent to a related place, then returns to the original train of thought like a cross-country traveler who just needed to stretch his legs on the platform for a second.

On the stylistic level, the poems are most often composed of simple declarative sentences, short in length, without many subordinate clauses or complex constructions. There’s not much enjambment of lines, not many metaphors or much figurative language. Most of the lines end with a period or a comma. There’s nothing really experimental, nothing neo-this or post-that at work here. And yet the poems consistently pop with brightness and originality against a humorous and clever backdrop.

Take, for instance, the poem about the man hanging out at the bottom of the swimming pool to check out (and not in a weird way) two dozen synchronized swimmers as they practice. Or the three poems about being at an acupuncturist’s. Or the two about lying on a hotel bed. The poems here are about small things: talking to his grandmother on the phone, visiting New York City, riding on an airplane, shoeing a horse. The poem “Windsor” begins, “I wish now to speak plainly about a one-eyed horse.” Then, for the rest of the poem, he talks plainly about a one-eyed horse. That is more or less how these poems work. One does not have to consult the etchings on Bruncvik’s Sword or stare intently at a pair of Leonardo’s used underpants during a penumbral lunar eclipse to unlock the secrets here, or to fully enjoy these poems for all that they are and aren’t. “Trying again I wrote / in capital letters THE READER / CAN ALMOST BE DUMB REALLY / AND STILL GET MY POEMS,” he writes in “Bluebirds.” Empirically, I can attest to that statement’s truth.

The source material Craig draws from is the same available to anyone else, but the results transcend the standard product. He talks often about things he sees in the newspaper, on TV, while driving his automobile. It’s through the peculiar alchemy that occurs in the writer’s/speaker’s head that these everyday scenes and situations become something of a more precious nature—to quote “After a Terrifying Nap”: “Not golden like a bar of gold / (an ingot) / or golden like honey / or paint on a football helmet. / It was another kind of gold.” That poem is about a golden grasshopper that falls into a car and comes to rest, next to a potato chip, on the floor in the backseat, below a soundly napping infant. That’s all that happens, really, yet the poet somehow arrives at, “The grasshopper sent forth a golden light. / The infant awoke in his car seat, / looked at the grasshopper / and wiggled his feet, his white socks.”

It’s worthwhile mentioning the sort-of shorthand poetics found in “Poem (The nitwit danced…)”: “To those people who are always talking about ‘surrealism’ / can I suggest you open your fucking eyes? / If you do this, you will see mothballs. And a green nightgown.” I think the point here is less whether these poems do or do not trade in surrealism than that such discussions are inherently less interesting than what one can see by simply opening one’s eyes and looking around. Ultimately, it’s what Craig sees, and how he sees it, that makes these poems work so well. “Clear writing is clear thinking,” he writes in “Humans.” The obvious danger in such perspicuity is that stripping away all the stylistic and poetic drapery is a bit like being naked in front of a crowded room of insurance salesmen: there’s nothing to conceal one’s human frailties from their prying, insatiable eyes. That Michael Earl Craig’s poems are continually as lean, well-proportioned, and finely chiseled as that other Renaissance giant, Michelangelo’s David (no relation), proves he has nothing at all to hide.

Tags: 9 stars, David Sewell, Michael Earl Craig, Wave Books
Posted in reviews

The Floating Bridge

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

by David Shumate
University of Pittsburgh Press 2008
Reviewed by David Sewell

Floater

the floating bridge One of the more flaccid criticisms of poetry these days is that it involves a sort of cool kids’ club wherein poets write poems for other poets who write poems for other poets who write poems for other poets, and so on and so on, and none of it sells. The idea evoked is that of looking into a mirror into another mirror ad infinitum, while all the while keeping one eye on the witty, handsome, urbane, not-as-judgmental-and-conceited-as-everyone-says person doing all this looking. Anyway. The other side of the proverbial pineapple upside-down cake is that there is another kind of poetry—one that appeals to a wider audience and one that, therefore, sells. Absent from this wider audience, of course, are those cool, cool poets writing for other cool, cool poets.

That I happen to be cooler than a polar bear’s entrails (shout out to Francis the Savannah Chitlin’ Pimp) casts me less as the denizen of an igloo than of an overpriced Brooklyn apartment with inefficient steam radiators. But this review isn’t meant to be entirely about me. Hullo, hullo, then, to David Shumate (no relation) and his new book of prose poems called The Floating Bridge. As I’m (obviously) still in the process of reviewing the book, and my bathtub is a sort of exaggerated Petri dish at the moment, I can’t say for sure whether the book floats, though I’m willing to wager that it does.

Of course, you’re likely ratiocinating right now, it’s all a matter of relative densities, and seeing as the density of a perfect-bound acid-free-paper book, even one published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, is less than that of… Let me stop you right there, Poindexter. What I mean is that there’s nothing too heavy here, nothing too deep or dense or…like I already said, heavy. To wit: The title poem operates as a sort of metaphor for poetry (“Sometimes the bridge is small and inconspicuous. Like a poem.”), though, unfortunately, it’s not one your penny-loafers will be able to scamper across without becoming at least a little bit wet. The poem itself floats, being that it’s neither hammered down to any sort of reality nor able to rise high enough to be of much interest to anyone in the trees. Its failure to either launch or burrow is illustrative of the book as a whole’s major weakness.

The unbearable lightness of many of these poems is just that—unbearable. For instance, the idea behind “Trapped Inside a Haiku Poem” (mind you, a haiku poem, not a haiku refrigerator or a haiku elevator) is exactly as the title reads. And the payoff? Robes, beards, a cabin, an open door, Basho—just what we’d expect, and nothing that we wouldn’t. (Is a duel between Basho and Buson using mackerel as weapons too much to ask for?) “The Amateur Zen Master” forgoes beards but throws in a bald head and sandals and name-drops the tree-falling and one-hand-clapping koans, then has the spamminess to end, “Somewhere far away a whole forest comes crashing down.”

Whether employing wobbly metaphors or just shopworn ones, the poems’ tendency to assume some semi-dopey supposition and then imagineer twelve or fifteen prose lines exploring it in the most obvious detail is almost always unrewarding. A few examples: taking a bus to Gomorrah, being Gertrude Stein’s gardener, happening across a “dying park,” meeting one’s past selves, getting a call from Sancho Panza, paying a visit to Dalí, paying a visit to Picasso. These poems are too polite, too limp, and too stale to have much bite. Their musing nature smacks less of the high art of poetry than of the low kitsch of sentiment and well-wishes.

Calling someone’s poems musings is, to me anyway, a call to arms, and if such an attack were leveled at me or mine, I fear I’d have no choice but to bid adieu to détente and stand to defend their honor in a most chivalrous manner, as those who truly know me know is my wont. So, though I do dare to call a musing a musing here, I do so with the full understanding that calamity may hence befall me. Though, to be perfectly honest, judging from the poems on display, I’m fairly certain that, were I to meet their maker, he would instead attempt to hug me, and…no, no no, that won’t do either. This is sticky business, this.

Why exactly Shumate is such a dedicated suitor of the prose poem I can only speculate, but, unfortunately, the prose form employed here only encourages an intellectually and poetically lazy sort of poem. Too often the poems lean on extended metaphors, such as the floating bridge, that go either nowhere or exactly where the non-trepanned reader always expected them to. In “Metaphors” he says, “It is pleasing to know there are so many metaphors in this world.” I have to respectfully disagree. For instance, I could do without the one in “The Island of Nirvana.” It begins, “Today I’m giving my students a multiple-choice test about the / island of Nirvana.” Then: “Its principal exports are flower and honey.” Sounds good to me. And I have a new bikini I’ve been dying to wear. Let’s go. Ahh, but wait. “This island is really a state of mind. And each day we / burn the boats that would ferry us ashore.” A bit of a downer, really, but at least now I know why I’m always wearing a bikini in my mind.

The other problem with a world full of metaphors, to be perfectly obvious about it, is that metaphors, by definition, stand in place of something else. In these poems, the metaphors are like stand-ins for roles that were never in the script—like, say, if a group of gin devotees biffed off from the local gin-palace and decided to launch an attack on the forestage of the nearby theater, variously vomiting on and groping each other throughout rehearsals. An ill-fated metaphor, no doubt, but were I to take up the rubric laid out in The Floating Bridge, before you can say, “Pass the gin, guvnor!” one of these valiant souls would be donning a red hat, one would be down on bended knee ruminating about the price of tube socks, and one would be twirling and twirling and twirling round the scenery until he realized that sometimes ’tis not the world going round that makes the difference, or some such simpering rubbish.

What I mean is that, too often, there simply is nothing behind the metaphors, no strong reason why they’re employed at all, except, perhaps, just grist for the mill. When the emperor’s thong is showing, well, it seems the jig is up. And the metaphors deployed here are too obvious and of common trade to be of any real use. The book as a whole rarely escapes the burden its commonality of thought and language imposes. One way to look at the poems would be to laud their straightforward, unself-conscious language and themes, but that would be wrong. That would be to turn poetry into a mentally disabled child whose every flatulence is worthy of a hearty round of applause. Which is not to cast aspersions at our hypothetical child. I would much rather sit in audience of his sonic performance than have to read books of poems that trade in tying bows around packages of comforting drivel and try to hug me through the pages in a confused Zen Buddhist I’m Okay, You’re Okay kind of way.

Because I don’t think this kind of thing is okay. In fact, I think that such poems—completely safe to leave in a newborn’s cage overnight, with no risk that the babe will try to choke on them or that they’ll come alive in the dark and sit on the little squeaker—perhaps, paradoxically, can only do harm to poetry, by painting the whole thing in the sort of soft light favored by art world maverick Thomas Kinkade. I don’t imagine they will have any effect whatsoever on the form, but I do think it’s worth noting that, perhaps in the world of poetry, if ever you find yourself standing on a floating bridge, it may just be that you missed the boat.

To focus the periscope a bit more on the poems, too often the prose sentences clunk on like an old Plymouth in need of a tune-up. “The Bedouins of Paris” begins with, “The city of Paris appeared to a band of Bedouins somewhere out in the Sahara.” Why not just say, “Paris appeared…” Unless, of course, he believes that, if “The city” were elided, the reader might think of…what? That Ilian rapscallion? That horse-faced heiress? That Aqua Netted hair band that would eventually spawn into Poison? The next poem in the section, “Spring in Paris,” begins, “They say that Paris is a magical city, especially in the spring.” Who does? Oh right, everyone. Forever. Though, again, why are “they” doing all the saying in the poem. Why not just say, “Paris is a magical city, especially in the spring”? A page or so later, “The Kissing Institute” (French kissing, get it?) starts with another whisper from the bushes: “I’m told there are institutes in Paris where you can learn the ancient art of kissing.” Really? By whom?

I keep wondering, why can’t he just say something, instead of telling us what someone else said? I want him to stand up and stand behind something, to have an actual idea, to take some chances, instead of loosing this endless parade of what-ifs on us. But, my hopes be dashed, for every page brings more and more toast in milk: “Perhaps only women should be allowed to live in Paris” (“The Gates of Paris”), or “They say the way to tell if a fish is fresh is to look it in the eye (“Fresh Fish”).

On top of that, there is entirely too much conjecture in these poems. Too many “maybes,” “ifs,” “likes,” and the sort. A poetry of the imagination can be great, but if one is employing the imagination for nothing greater than to personify the north wind, or if all one finds in imagining what it would be like to visit Dalí is that “he greets us as the door on seven-foot stilts” and there’s a swimming pool filled with vinegar, well, not much has been gained.

The ending of the Dalí poem reiterates a point I made above. It reads: “But we remind him we have far to / travel. And it’s late. We point to the clock on the wall as proof. It / is almost fully melted.” Another groaner, it’s consistent with many endings in this book, which are routinely clumsy and try entirely too hard to resonate and/or promote the P in poetry. Whether these bad endings ruin the poems depends on how you feel about the logic of double-jeopardy.

Ultimately, debating whether these poems are any good is to miss the point completely, if I can condescend so flabbily (I can—if I may, I mean). To piggy-back on the book’s central metaphor, they’re safely in the mainstream of poetry, flowing along somewhere in the middle, content not to rock the boat. No doubt, many people, relatively speaking, will read these poems and will find doing so a pleasurable experience. And many people, of a different sort, will bung their noses up in the air, scanning the firmament for the ghost of T.S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens flitting by, to carry them off to some more rarefied altitude. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Who cares? What’s clear is that these aren’t important poems. Depending on who you are, that means either everything or nothing.

Tags: 5 stars, David Sewell, David Shumate, University of Pittsburgh Press
Posted in reviews

God Particles

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

by Thomas Lux
Houghton Mifflin 2008
Reviewed by David Sewell

Just in Time!

lux cover Within mere minutes of being handed this book by Coldfront’s own hyacinth boy and squirreling it in my man-style tote bag for safekeeping, things in my life started to fall apart. Common sense may argue that it is I and, more particularly, my puff adder of a mouth that’s responsible for all of my problems, but I’m not ready to let Thomas Lux off the hook yet.

“God knows, / there’s no reason for God to feel guilt,” the title poem sashays. Well, duh. I was saying that Lux may be to blame, not God. Anyway. “I think He was downhearted, weary, too weary / to be angry anymore, or vengeful, / or forgiving, and He wanted each of us, / and all the things we touch / and are touched by, / to have a tiny piece of Him, / though we are unqualified / for even a crumb of a crumb.”

So, yes, it would seem then that God is not the one to hang the seagull necklace on—I mean, he tried, creating me from some old dust, giving me a good go at it on my own. Even after he threw in the towel, with the blowing himself up and the precipitating the particles and everything. He tried. His conscience is clear. But it was just too late. I was busy touching those around me with Sewell particles, instead of God particles (which, as I’ve noted, were in my in-no-way-feminine tote, yet unread), and that has made all the difference. The “tender rain of Him” falling “on every cow, ladle, leaf, human, ax handle, swing set” had not come soon enough for some of us swing sets. As Lux says, we are unqualified for His particles. And Sewell particles are simply not good enough for girls with page-boy haircuts. It is not how He wanted it to be; it is how it is.

Speaking of which, I sometimes think it’s a good idea that they don’t let cars drive on the sidewalk. At any rate, in the interests of aversion therapy, I will now attempt something like a review of this book, even though it may very well curse to damnation anyone who grasps it, which you may want to keep in mind when considering a purchase. I’m not saying that, without a doubt, it will ruin your life to be within cat-swinging distance of this slim volume, but I do think caution is key in situations such as this. One must be so careful these days.

Unfortunately, the darkly bright and sprite Lux of books past, the Lux who seems to live in another world entirely, has been too much in our soiled cities of petty jealousies and violent skirmishes to be as much fun as we may want. There are still flashes of the old brilliance here and there. The first section doesn’t disappoint in this regard. “Peacocks in Twilight,” for example, lives in that Tate/Knott/Edson nexus that amazes in ways delightful and disturbing. After telling us of his plans to shoot said peacocks in twilight with his father’s gun, he adds, “Daddy didn’t like peacocks / in twilight either, they offended / an iron aesthetic of his, something to do / with loathing cheap beauty, the meretricious, which I must have inherited, / or else I love to hear and see / the peahens weep.”

“Behind the Horseman Sits Black Care” is strange and fun and from a place that only Lux and a few others seem able to plumb with consistent results. Various dead or dying (one presumes) people—Black Care, Slit Throat, Nipple Cancer, et al.—are all riding, stacked on each other’s shoulders and such, on the chevalier’s horse, to death, or hell, or somewhere dark. But the Horseman “prefers none of this.” He “desires a doorway, / a cave’s mouth, a clothesline—or best: a low, hard, / garrotey branch.”

File that poem and “Her Hat, That Party on Her Head,” with its fine balance of silliness and resonance (the woman with the “birthday party on her head” is pacing aimlessly, in apparent pain over a loss), and most of the other poems in the first section next to the Lux poems everyone knows and loves. These are poems of a beguiling and belying clarity and a practiced ease of language, sometimes annoyingly novel (“Hitler’s Slippers”) and sometimes asking one too many dances of an extended metaphor (“The Lead Hour,” “The Pier Aspiring”), but altogether delightful in their revealing of a highly personal and individual world and a wonderfully adept and talented tour guide.

In Act 2 of three, Lux seems to have been loosed on the moor, where he wanders aimlessly, excoriating wildly and shaking a cold fist hither and thither. Our God from the title poem may be too tired and old to be angry anymore, but age seems to be having an opposite effect on Lux. And, unfortunately, anger, as of most men, is unbecoming of him. One sees this ire mostly aimed at those who would use God’s name to blow something/someone up. Fair enough. But Lux here is less the poet than the cable news hector. “Their Feet Shall Slide in Due Time” soberly finds solace in Deuteronomy’s promise that “the wicked, the venal, / shall face a steep, greasy hill whose fortress / they cannot take,” where inevitably they’ll lose their footing and fall. “Invective,” on the other hand, wishes some special someone “boils, pocks, and blisters.” Lux prays that “your son wish to be a poet” and “your wife fucks you / in the ass,” and, finally, that “your next breath, / and each one thereafter, fills your lungs / with the stink of your corpse.”

Lux rails against the consumerization of Christ (or relics, at least; “Jesus’ Baby Teeth”) and informs us that, though he did behead his neighbor’s ceramic duck, “a book / did not tell me I had the right to do so, / nor did I hear a voice, / a promise, from a pearly place.” As the poem “5,495″ chides us, Jesus was, apparently, whipped 5,495 times. For comparison’s sake, “A Jew on the way to the gas chamber didn’t (collectively / is another story), nor did he carry / the gas chamber on his back / to the chamber site.” The poem ends, “every day in your name, and/or your father’s, or / some other god’s, God forgive me.” God, yes; Apollo, maybe not.

This my-god-can-do-more-pushups-than-your-god stuff is tiresome (“Certainly my god / can rip the heart from your god’s chest” is maybe meant sarcastically, is maybe in someone else’s mouth, but still…) and not particularly well served by a poetic setting, nor does poetry benefit much from having it as a subject matter. This section of religion/God-tinged poems pulls a few other monkeys out of its hat, but they mostly beat the same diminutive tin cymbals over and over again. There is a bit of freshness here, too, but if you really want to know more about the poem that imagines some Amish marauders murdering a drunken Quaker, you will have to risk curse and damnation and pick up the book for yourself.

The third section is underwhelming, too, but for different, less-jingo-jangly reasons. At times it feels like the good poems went in the first section, the God poems in the second, and the less-good everything else in the third. “Mole Emerging from Trench Wall, Verdun, 1916″ is perhaps the best of the section, and it shows that temporal distance serves Lux better than trying to deal with contemporary issues, such as the very current problem of religiously motivated terrorism. “Toad on a Golf Tee” explores just what the title portends and proves that, though a poem can be written about most anything, maybe not always a worthwhile one.

There are several cases where Lux seems to be pointing at poets and poetry he doesn’t like, often in a sarcastic kind of way. From “Vaticide”: “The murder (metaphorical) of poets, / is not such a bad idea in some cases.” It’s probably best not to think too much of this, but that three or so poems deal with Lux’s feelings for other poets paints the poor man’s Fabio in a somewhat cranky light. Ditto the couple or so poems that praise the act of reading and libraries—preaching to the choir, perhaps, and, as with the poems against certain poets/poetry, time spent somewhat profligately.

In the end, it’s only about one-half of the book that hits the sweet spot. I admire that Lux has the courage to take things to places he doesn’t always go, it’s just that some of these poems might have been better kept in his private reserve. Then again, it’s been recently proven that I should just stop talking, and maybe that I should have never started. So, as with many good poets, bad or less-good Lux is not bad poetry, it’s just a reminder of what we miss in a person we’ve come to know and like. As for bad Sewells, well, as Lux once wrote, love is “all sore and dumb / and dangerous.” Sewells sometimes too.

Tags: 6 stars, David Sewell, Houghton Mifflin 2008, Thomas Lux
Posted in reviews

Sunday Houses the Sunday House

Monday, August 20th, 2007

by Elizabeth Hughey
University of Iowa Press 2007
Reviewed by David Sewell

Good Enough

hughey cover

I have no special insight into the cost-revenue ratio employed in the publishing of poetry books, whether the page count determines the cover price or whether there’s any sort of consistency in this regard throughout the industry. Is it laughable to introduce the concept of profit margins when talking about poetry books? Is that $14 price tag a phantom number, something picked blindly out of an overturned beret? Are profits being actively maximized (a necessity with such low volume?), or are publishers just barely keeping the lights on? No matter. What I really wonder is whether a poet who is publishing his/her first book is likely to be given fewer pages by the publisher or whether he/she is just likely to have at his/her disposal fewer pages of poems the publisher is willing to print under its imprimatur. I wonder because it seems that first books lately (or the ones I’ve been reading, anyway) have been slight on page counts. But more disturbing than this page-count modesty is that many of these collections, often of about 50 pages of poems, still contain what might—perhaps too harshly, perhaps perfectly fairly—be called filler.

Which, long way round, is how we arrive at Sunday Houses the Sunday House by Elizabeth Hughey, winner of the 2007 Iowa Poetry Prize. Hughey is a strong poet, but this is not an exceptionally strong book. The good poems in it are quite good. But strip out the lesser poems, which to me seem not nearly half as good as the book’s best poems, and you’re left with only 30 or so pages. Not a lot, really. But I don’t blame Hughey for this. It is more the poetry-prize process, the editor responsible for the shape of the book (am I being naïve here?), and the poetry-industrial complex that deserve the blame.

To be clearer, I think Hughey has a really good book in her, perhaps just over the horizon. Sunday Houses, though, is only about half-way home. Poems like “A One and A,” for example, show a strong, inventive voice with masterful control. Here are the last four lines:

With that, the party that I skipped eight years ago finally ends.
Tony wakes in the kitchen chair, Adam calls a taxi, Katherine
takes off her purple dress, and Dave and Allison move to Austin
with their terrier.

As in this poem, Hughey is often interested in temporality, in troubling linear time by traveling back and forth and all around it. This suspension of events or a line of thought or whatever, this artful time travel is not just a poetic gimmick: it really gets to the seemingly haphazard organizing that goes on in our minds, the time-space relationship in general, the almost arbitrariness of many aspects of ourselves and our lives, and, especially, the relationships and the physical and emotional wounds that just won’t seem to heal no matter how much time has elapsed. Does anything actually stop happening, she seems to be asking, or does our attention just shift? The only problem is that she uses this blueprint more than a few times. In a longer book, maybe this is fine; in a book this length, with poems this length (short), the foundation starts to look less solid.

She takes us backwards in time in “The Long Hello” (“I am going to live this whole thing backwards next time”), to arrive at the really good closing line, “After years of eating saffron, I will know nothing about saffron.” But then we have “Country Song” and “Happiest Hours” later in the book, on facing pages. From “Country Song”: “When I received a letter / from you, I had already read it.” From “Happiest Hours”: “I walk back through the / years, knock on George’s door, and find him on the couch.” The book isn’t chiefly about traveling backwards in time, which would, perhaps, justify repeated sorties in this direction. And it’s short, so three or four instances of the exact same engine in a relatively small space come across less like a theme than a lack of inspiration. On their own, though, these poems are strong. The closing of “Happiest Hours” is almost worth the price of admission:

They’ll have a baby named after a common flower. Some hot
nights, George will sleep naked on the kitchen floor. It gets pretty
bad again after that, so I tell him that I’ll stop for now. He says to
get from his apartment to a cornfield, you have to do much more
than go left.

But the strength of the individual poems is weakened by the reality of the book, and that’s a real shame, and is unfair to the poems and to their writer. It’s an old complaint, but it’s still true that if you set the bar high for yourself, and Hughey clearly does, every attempt that fails to achieve such a height will be especially clear. Whether this is fair doesn’t really matter.

I’m not arguing for a book as a sort of monolith, for a book full of the same sort of poems. Like every word, every line, every poem…every book is its own little monster, and it’d be idiotic (a mode I’m surely not above), to argue for some blueprint or other. I’m only saying that, in the book that I have here to review, the temporally complicated, world-upside-down, event- or character-driven poems (which often appear in prose blocks, or at least long-lined poems) are infinitely more successful than the other poems, which vary in their exact form (lineated usually, in couplets sometimes) but are, as a whole, more image driven, much shorter, and lacking the spark that seems responsible for the better poems.

In “Looks Skyward in Coastal Counties,” we have, apparently, answers to questions we’re not privy to: “A blue ribbon, James. / The Great Lakes, Richard.” Such lines, and the poems they compose, seem like not much more than ballast. “Warnings to Be Heeded” lists warnings to be heeded. We might read something biographical in the things listed, but even then, there’s not a lot there. “Subjects Not Suitable for Autofocus, Fuji Instruction Manual / Love, by Guy De Maupassant” is a strange and clever found poem, contrasting lines from a camera manual with lines from the syphilitic Frenchman. There’s a “telephone play”, a poem called “Tied for Impiety” that lists examples of things or people who are tied for impiety…my point is that these poems seem more inspired by the need to write a poem than by something burning hot inside the poet. And, at the risk of repeating myself, this is a first book, and I can’t help but believe that a first book should be a big, unified artistic/poetic/aesthetic/personal statement, not a sometimes-really-good-sometimes-just-okay compilation.

The other lesser poems, I’m not so sure what they’re up to—mainly they ruminate or riff on an image for not very long, racing, it seems, to get to the end (the last five lines of the 11-line “Egg, Egg,” for instance). Often these are very short poems, more imagistic and more abstract. “Look Skyward in Coastal Counties,” “Not to Mention the Trees Coming Up to My Waist,” and “What Bird,” for example, seem to operate on a level of mysteriousness that neither benefits the poems nor is earned by the lines that are present in them. Other poems (“Afternoon,” “Dogwood, David, Dogwood”) are perhaps too clearly and too strongly driven by the concept behind them (and, though, in truth, I find “Dogwood, David, Dogwood” to be a strange choice for the last poem in this collection, it does have its charms).

But anyway. The dissolution of constructs—whether linear time or the domestic order or actual houses and people—is a lot of what’s happening in these poems. It’s an interesting viewpoint, a real attempt to examine, like an even more articulate Demian, the life around us by taking it apart, by walking all over it. Indeed, it seems that it’s domesticity that Hughey has her most trenchant observations about—and where she most consistently shines. Though the author photo belies the sentiment somewhat, lines like “I am no across- / the-room beauty” and “I play the woman / as cool as an open refrigerator” show a talented poet with an intriguing personal point of view, and lines like “Nothing is left unfucked in this world” and “The wrecked world is mending itself like a starfish” take that beyond the personal. And in a really interesting way.

It seems, though, that Hughey is really only able to strut her stuff in a certain type of poem, the ones I’ve been talking about as being successful. While I can hear the opposing viewpoint, that shorter, lighter, somehow different poems add levity and balance and make for a better book, in this case, I’m not buying it. And that is, basically, my argument for why one half of this book is better than the other half—the less-good poems seem less important not just to me or to the imaginary reader, but to the writer.

But this is starting to feel like I’m grinding a personal axe, which is less the case than that I feel the need to approach this review in a way that interests me as well as, hopefully, you. The mystery inherent in good poetry, I think, makes a lot of reviewing beside the point anyway. As I’ve said, these are many good poems here, but good is not always (if ever) good enough. Sunday Houses the Sunday House was good enough for the Iowa Poetry Prize, but was the Iowa Poetry Prize good enough to Sunday Houses the Sunday House? Hard to say.

Tags: 6 stars, David Sewell, Elizabeth Hughey, University of Iowa Press
Posted in reviews

Rise Up

Monday, May 7th, 2007

by Matthew Rohrer
Wave Books 2007
Reviewed by David Sewell

The Good Husband

rise up Matthew Rohrer started his poetic career atop a hummock in a place called the Malookas. It was a weird place—people worshipped batteries, a bridge was emotionally depressed, everywhere the luminous fork!—but a fun and fresh place, all the same. Rohrer’s been making steady progress out of those surreal woods for a while now, finding the path in Satellite, nearing the edge in A Green Light, and now, in Rise Up, he’s out (with a few special leaves tucked under his cap)—and at home in Brooklyn (though not always). He now has a wife, a baby boy, and a nagging sense that the world outside is not so hot.

Actually, it’s really hot:

The port town of Koper is hot,
the hills and vineyards of Brda are hot,
Park Slope is miserable, somewhere a storm
waits for us, it scoots. Sunset Park is hot,
Greenwood Heights is an imaginary place
that is stifling.

The poem’s ending sums up the socio-political landscape (I feel weird writing that) of the book: “No one is happy / but the rich, who are very happy.” There are many annoyances shared by those living in New York: one is the summer heat, another is, of course, finding an apartment. “Let us drink to the collapse of real estate,” ends “Poem in the Manner of Coleridge.” I’ve already uncorked the bottle.

The unhappiness Rohrer mentions is, on the one hand, the result of the world outside his domestic bubble:

Money burrows
its way to the very core
of the earth. It’s time
for us to leave the Earth

(from “Winning Isn’t Everything”)

He hates those who “smack the table / with the flat of the Sword / of the Absolute” (“In a Bower of Rosemary”). And he quotes someone who is “frightened and too lazy to think things through” and is “going to vote with [his/her] ass” (“Winning Isn’t Everything”). But there is hope: “The good news is I saw the open door / of a gentle wonder, where I want to live,” ends the first poem in the book. And that’s pretty much where Rohrer takes us—along with him as he tries to find that gentle wonder.

Which brings us to the other source of his unhappiness (but also its solution): life at home. Things are not perfect here either:

Our house
a terrible current
manifestation of the cosmos
leaks love.

There’s a lot of crying going on—baby, wife, everyone, it seems. In “Statistics of Deadly Quarrels,” we’re stuck inside the poet’s head as he chews over and over, for 11 pages, the quarrels outside (wars, storms, lack of justice) and, more importantly, the one inside, between him and his wife:

I sleep
imperfectly, I’m covered
by my wife, she thinks I said
something hurtful on purpose,
she rolls away, down a hill.

Still, married life suits him. “Then we / met, and the truly blessed, when they / draw the Sword of Resentment, are showered in blossoms.”

Rohrer is clearly a romantic (and a Romantic), but one who screws up regularly—“I make her feel like / she’s eaten a spoonful of peanut butter” (“Four Romantic Poets”)—and one who clearly needs/needed saving. In “Poem for the East River,” he confesses, “I will never plunge into you / … I was going to throw myself in front / of the F train, in dreamworld, but not here.” The physical and emotional distance that sometimes arises between the poet and his wife/home is a real source of pain. It goes something like this:

Go away, miss her
drive over a silver & blue river
go home
Breathe, breathe
the darkness needs a little shove.

And that’s it. The poet is ever trying to shove away that darkness, or at least to ride it out in the corner bagel place until the black clouds pass. As a document of love in the time of colic, Rise Up succeeds wholeheartedly. The surrealistic flourishes of the past are not missed, or are honed to absolute sharpness (“the room is gently lit by the green / shirt you gave me,” from “Poem”). There’s a wealth of real feeling here buttressed by a strong sense that the poems really matter to the poet. He should never have to apologize for any of it.

Tags: 8 stars, David Sewell, Matthew Rohrer
Posted in reviews

Embryoyo

Tuesday, March 20th, 2007

by Dean Young
Believer Books 2007
Reviewed by David Sewell

Walk the Dog

In the July/August ’05 issue of Poetry (nominally, at least, that year’s “humor” issue), Dean Young reviewed his latest book, Embryoyo, and nine others. Well, sort of. Here’s part of what he said: “But in Mr. Young’s what seems zillioneth slim volume of verse there is a seeming inability to take what is serious seriously, and let us not forget the enactment of the sacred is the enactment of separation. What abominable mixing we have in this monstrous tome, and one feels often like one is watching a clown burst into tears, a very uncomfortable, even traumatizing experience should it happen to a young mind.”

Poetry usually calls its omnibus reviews “Ten Takes”—or however many takes are present. Young calls his, a sort of satirical poem as review, “Ten Tokes.” I mention this only because if there’s anything worth regularly assailing in Young’s writing, it’s that his sense of humor has the tendency to go a bit too slack or wind up a bit too puerile, which that title is a decent enough example of.

Young does manage to be regularly funny, though, and while his M.O. in Embryoyo is pretty much the same one he’s been running with for the last three or so books—mixing funny with serious—this time it seems he’s a bit more focused—here, on death (“So what is the cause of death?” begins “Inverness Grey”) and immutability in a life (“So much life we cannot have or / find or repeat yet so much we had and found,” from “Resignation Letter”). So it seems the jokey-jokes are not so important, or present, this time around.

A quick aside or two, though, before we really get going: In the June ’05 New Criterion, the critic William Logan said a number of bitchy things about Young’s previous book, Elegy on Toy Piano (which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a fact that is mentioned in four separate places in the otherwise toothsomely designed Embryoyo). Here’s one of the barbs from Logan’s review: “Elegy on Toy Piano shows what happens when a poet inherits a difficult, contradictory tradition (the uses of surrealism are almost as various as the use of lyric) and can make nothing out of it but trash.”

And, in response to “Ten Tokes,” someone calling himself Charles Douthat, whom Google advises is a lawyer in Connecticut, wrote in to Poetry with a knee-slapper of his own, implying, one, that Poetry has ethics and, two, that it is engaged in a journalistic endeavor. Here’s his opening salvo, which he somehow managed to get down on paper despite the state of shock he had been unwittingly dragged into: “I am shocked, reading the letters you elect to print, that not a single reader has complained about the extraordinary breach of journalistic ethics evidenced in the July/August issue.”

I mention these two responses because I think it’s worth noting that Young’s poems tend to radically polarize those who have been exposed to them (and they give “Ten Tokes” the perspective it deserves). That said, it seems that what Logan is up to is furthering his defense of an old guard that is not old as much as decrepit, and that Douthat, well, that Douthat just needs to chill out.

As I’ve mentioned, Embryoyo sees Young doing pretty much the same thing he’s been up to for a while. The usual wit and imagination are in as prodigious supply as ever. All of Young’s normal moves are in play—mixing of the high and low (“It is not that I love ottava rima less / now that I know it is a verse form / and not a Renaissance hooker,” from “Continuing Instruction”), rapid juxtapositions (Frankenstein appears later in the poem), the surreal (“It doesn’t hurt when the raven / puts its beak into my chest,” from “Mortal Coil”), the absurd (“It is now clear that eating your own brain / will make you mad,” from “House of Geodes”), and the just plain silly (“Bunny glimpsed by headlight: sailor’s / delight; bunny in the morning red: / might as well stay in bed,” from “Bunny Tract”).

In “Clam Ode,” he talks a bit about clams then makes a detour to talk about sucking jawbreakers on the Jersey Shore. Reflecting on this jawbreaker detour, he writes: “What does this have to do with clams? / A feeling.” Reading Young’s poems requires a sizeable amount of trust on the part of the reader, as it’s clear we’re going to be rapidly moved around to wherever Young’s feelings take him. This can be exciting, but also confusing, even, at times, exasperating. But, like it or not, this is the Dean Young engine.

Where Young has perhaps struggled most before has been in balancing the antic impulse with the need to leave the reader with something resonant. In Elegy, though the line between the two is often somewhat muddy, or even, at times, too stark, the poems still work, even if they aren’t always perfect creations. The poems in Embryoyo, for the most part—owing to the fact that Young is more focused or, perhaps, more singularly obsessed—strike a more satisfying balance. “No Forgiveness Ode,” a highly rewarding poem, begins like this:

The husband wants to be taken back
into the family after behaving terribly
but nothing can be taken back

Young then goes on to list several examples of things that can’t be taken back—leaves, rain, ugly things said. Listing, or exemplifying, is a mode he falls into regularly, and this mode’s success depends on how interesting/fresh/moving the little lists are. The list in this poem is, I think, a good one, though it’s good mainly because it doesn’t try to be too cute or clever. The poem ends well, and the ending actually has a feeling of inevitability—it doesn’t seem to be just the sense-making cap on a madcapping poem. Here it is:

The heart needs its thorns
just as the rose its profligacy.
Just because you’ve had enough
doesn’t mean you wanted too much.

But here’s a beginning that doesn’t work quite as well, from “Glow Ode”:

My best idea so far had been
to take a girl to a half-built house
and feel her up but bras back then
allowed a woman to feel secure
knowing if she fell from an airplane
into the ocean and was snagged and dragged
through the water by 50 mph barracudas
her foundation would remain in place
so you think I’d be better prepared
but some experiences can only be true
if you’re not prepared.

Here’s another beginning, from “Sean Penn Anti-Ode”:

Must Sean Penn always look like he’s squeezing
the last drops out of a sponge and the sponge
is his face?

The first example reminds me of a Saturday Night Live sketch allowed to go on too long (though the poem recovers by the ending [“no one noticed / my new floor until I told them, / how it makes the whole kitchen glow / and one of the guys who laid it / only had one arm!”]); the second reminds me that different people find very different things funny. But there aren’t many major hiccups in the book, if hiccups these be. More often he hits his stride, doing the thing that only he seems able to do—riding his impish persona to illogical ends, making something out of an awful lot, combining all the disparate elements he fancies into one big jumble of a successful poem.

In “Leaves in a Dead Swimming Pool,” Young writes, “Theories about art aren’t art any / more than a description of an aphid is an aphid. A menu isn’t a meal. We’re trying to build birds, not birdhouses.” I like that as a shorthand poetics. And keeping that in mind, it’s hard to take too much issue with Young’s attempts at building birds, an ambitious undertaking, no doubt. Maybe some of his poems-cum-birds are a bit too big, maybe some deliver the same note too many times in succession. But like alchemy or astrology, what Young is up to is not science. We’d do well to remember that.

To touch briefly on Young’s self-review excerpted above, one problem he has is not that he can’t take the serious seriously—which, in Embryoyo, he does—but that, at times, he entrusts the not serious or not really interesting with a seriousness/prominence/presence it doesn’t really deserve (the bra and barracuda business, for example).

But at the center of all of Young’s pyrotechnics, the speaker so consistently (Young is consistent above all things) evinces such a bountiful amount of humanity (“I would rather spend an hour with a dying squirrel than tour a cathedral,” from “Paradise Poem”) that the resulting persona, which we already know is highly entertaining to listen to, is also quite likeable. Combine that with Young’s fecund imagination and his willingness to take grand risks, and the resulting poems are quite good.

As for our Connecticut lawyer, I think that his sense of humor could clearly use a bit of fresh air. And as for Logan, the adage that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure is never more relevant than when considering Young’s poems, or, for that matter, when considering Logan’s.

But Young’s idiosyncratic babel is not trash. It’s something else, something hard to put a finger on. The poems always seem to be flying away—from easy sense making, from themselves, from us. It’s almost as if they are birds. And, as birds, most of them soar well above the seed-pecked fields of contemporary poetry.

Tags: 9 stars, Believer Books, David Sewell, Dean Young
Posted in reviews

Goat Funeral

Wednesday, February 7th, 2007

by Christopher Bakken
The Sheep Meadow Press 2006
Reviewed by David Sewell

Suffer the Kids

bakken cover Smartly weaving archetypes into contemporary poems can result in all sorts of things—Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, getting a free pass on adorning your surname with an umlaut, hell, even interesting poems.

Christopher Bakken (who, if Coldfront had a fact-checker, I would claim is of Greek heritage [Bakken is not of Greek heritage —Coldfront Fact-Checker]) lives, at least some of his life, in Pennsylvania. As crazy as that sounds, his imagination seems often to reside in another place entirely—the cradle of international dreamboat Yanni, Greece.

The titular poem in Goat Funeral, Bakken’s second book of original poems, is a good place to begin. The poem (“Eclogue 4: Goat Funeral”) is one of several poems set in the land of feta and foam parties. For those of you who don’t know, an eclogue (derived from the Greek, by the way) is a poem in which shepherds (mostly) converse with each other or with the hills.

But your edification and my condescension aside, dear reader, we still have the poem to deal with. Formally introducing the goat, Bakken says, “The dead one was wreathed with olive leaves, / a pile of grain uneaten at the mouth.” Does Charon have an anti-goat policy on his ferry? Is the fare for passage a pile of grain? I don’t know. But that’s a wonderful image he’s sketched for us, and the poem is full of them. Here’s the opening:

I fled the tavern soaked with booze and gravitas,
stumbled into the scrub along the river,
cursing the whole crowd, their bouzouki kitsch,
the ardor of their mob confidence,
woke only when that shepherd Julianna
lit the pyre for her stillborn goat, wailed
against the spirit that claimed it too soon.

An auspicious start, no doubt. The funeral unfolds as we might expect a goat funeral to, including the entrance of the speaker’s characteristically human desire—lionized or, say, wolf-ified—near the end. It’s set in opposition to (and also co-opts) the bestial and the divine, thereby constituting the common classical trinity:

What choice did I have? The goat was dead,
the girl pretty, the river risen too high.
It was for her the animal inside me
rose from its lair, shook off its winter sleep,
and I took her in my arms, and stoked the fire,
and helped her burn—oh heartless god—the little beast.

Poets from Heaney to Pope to Spenser to Virgil have taken up the goatherd’s staff and loosed their yawps o’er grassy fields, and it’d be, perhaps, unfair and pointless to compare Bakken’s attempts with theirs, so I won’t. But Bakken’s eclogues, which comprise only one section (of five) in the book, are my favorites in the collection, and are a strong argument for poems (or their makers) booking passage on an Olympic Airlines flight ASAP. I myself would consider sacrificing a goat to Apollo, asking him to compel Bakken to write a full book of eclogues, but I’m a vegetarian, and it would be, no doubt, difficult to convince Hermes to visit the Keystone State, anyway.

It was perhaps misleading to imply that archetypes and things Greek are central to the book, for the majority of the book doesn’t actually reside there, and the Gods and their mortal minions don’t make all that many appearances—though the eclogues do seem to be rooted in another world/time. (That his cat is later referred to as a “Dionysian prowler” doesn’t really add much strength to the idea.) But Bakken seems to be strongest when he’s off in another world, dealing with all the problems of being human—full of desire and inertia, exposed often to the vicissitudes of Nature, spirits/gods, and other humans.

“Purgatory, a Postcard” seconds that emotion. “I attend the hangings. The library / isn’t half bad. I try not to complain.” Especially admirable are the matter-of-factness and the vibrant and fresh imagery in the poem (“I ate octopus with a survivor tonight. / We slammed vodka, compared tattoos.”), which result in a wholly successful (and mesmerizing) sonnet. The final couplet couldn’t be cleaner: “Though it’s much colder here than one expects, / things are, I must say, awfully beautiful.” Bakken is a capable and compelling poet, and poems like “Purgatory” and the section that contains the eclogues prove it.

The poems in this short collection (about 50 pages of poetry) never really fall flat, but some feel less capable of floating off to Olympus than others. With a handful of highly successful exceptions (“Ariadne [Postscript],” “Last Words from Elpenor,” and “Aegean: Flight 652” among them—all back in Greece, please note), most of the rest of the book consists of poems ekphrastically concerned with a “detail” from a painting or dedicated to channeling a dead writer or character (Pessoa, Milosz, Lawrence, William Matthews, Celan, Coleridge, and Quasimodo all have poems, often called “duets,” written for or about them). While Bakken’s talents are in strong supply here, too, I resent these poems—or their inclusion, at least—for making the book feel more scattershot than it might have felt had they been given harbor in another collection. Ditto the coming-of-age poem, the road poem, and the poem about the blue jay—not bad, just not as interesting, and perhaps a little rote.

There is the recurring theme of displacement, of wandering (and wondering), of traveling toward somewhere else—an unknown somewhere, perhaps—throughout most of the book that gives it a unified and captivating movement—“Always moving,” “Azaleas” begins. In the wonderful “First Objects,” he elaborates: “We might have stayed put, but couldn’t bear / the sense that we were rising, calm as geese / caught between the sights of a shogun.” If Bakken can, in the future, stay put in his resplendent Hellenic-inflected imagination for a good while, and avoid the art museum and his personal library, he may just write a book with the smell, taste, and texture of ambrosia. Goat Funeral isn’t quite that, but it’s not chopped liver, either.

Tags: 7 stars, Christopher Bakken, David Sewell
Posted in reviews

Rain

Friday, November 17th, 2006

by Jon Woodward
Wave Books 2006
Reviewed by David Sewell

Don’t Go Away

rain Jon Woodward’s second book, Rain, comprises either six poems, sixty-one poems, or one poem. Though, either/or perhaps isn’t the most apt construction. Likely, an attentive reading will reveal that the book comprises not one of those options but all of them. There are six titled poems, each containing a number of poems (one per page) that
function both discretely and within the context of the larger poem/poems. Each line has five words, and each stanza has five lines. (There are a very, very few exceptions: a couple one-line stanzas, a few of those with fewer than five words.) The other major formal element: There is no punctuation in any of the poems, and only proper nouns are capitalized.

The stage set, let’s get to the action. Er, hold on. There’s not that much actually happening in these poems, which are, more or less (no, certainly more), ruminations on the day-to-dayness of daily life, or else enactments thereof. In one poem, he orders a cheeseburger; in another, he sees a movie. In others: buys fruit and finds a broken egg, sees two birds, thinks about masturbating, rides the bus, takes a shower.

But not so fast. There’s an arithmetic working in the book (that is, the poems are adding up to something), and, anyway, the poems are not all merely chewing the mundane. There’s something dark and huge lurking behind the second poem sequence, “Rain, Ocean” (and likely, in a more general sense, behind all of them). The poem is mainly about the speaker and his relationship with his friend Patrick, though, naturally, rain and the ocean also figure in. In the first poem in the sequence, he and Patrick are sitting at a bus stop, one presumes waiting for a bus. They

were talking about how some

things look like other things
it’s one of the seven
basic conversations then he said
a thing here reproduced what
a brutally fascinating world it

was stirring if a little
extrapolatory he could only have
been able to see a
tiny part of the world
from where we were sitting

From that pithy thesis on poetry/life/being, the poems recount different scenes with Patrick. (He’s absent from some poems in the sequence. Of these, we might just assume that Patrick has something to do with them or, rather, we might assume they have something to do with Patrick.) Anyway. There’s this idea that Patrick is dead or dying
that keeps recurring. One poem begins,

it’s not that he died
it’s that he won’t stop
dying and reemerging fully ordinarily
through ordinary doors saying in
his own voice hey brother

The same poem/door ends, “it won’t help / him untwist from his rope.” The next poem in the sequence begins with “don’t know why he keeps / dying.” Later in the sequence, “two / black dogs are staring at / me and Patrick is dead / again.” The reason Patrick keeps dying is that his death is being enacted and reenacted in these poems. The poem is an attempt to make sense of or at least to deal with his death and is a powerful portrait of a life stuck in grief. Both a Platonic-love poem and an elegy for Patrick, the poem ends on a lyrically tense note: “Sic / Transit Gloria Patrick goes Sic / Transit my Chowder Shitting Ass.”

Rain is fairly short for a collection, which seems to reflect Wave’s interest in publishing books of poems that work fully as books. The remainder of the book features the following poems: “Attempt” is a funny poem about relationships and sexual desire, full
of self-doubt and self-awareness (“in a terrible / accident I hope you’re not / in a coma at the / hospital hope you just blew / me off); “The Long Night of Ezekiel,” referencing, it would seem, Chris Elliot’s character in Scary Movie 4, takes more of a dreamy tack, perhaps appropriate to the poem’s ostensible point of focus (my late grandmother / sat on top of the / dam it would’ve been unsafe / for a person but she’d / come back a sunlight finch); “Leap,” rooted in the humdrum, is a fine little encapsulation of a slightly askew
personality (“I / wonder if all my currently / living grandparents are still alive”); and “Love Poems and Myopia” is a fitting title for the last sequence of poems.

From the quotations included above, it should be clear that the formal constraints add a certain kinetic energy to many of the line breaks, which in a nonformal poem would be, simply or not, self-conscious enjambments. As is often the case with formal constraints, here they’re not really constraints at all, but quite the opposite.

Though it rains throughout the book, the poems never really slip up. Their simple language captures what is beautiful about a life in which not much happens (most lives, by the way)—that is, we’re alive to see, and hear, and touch, and contemplate it, whatever it is. It’s not so much that there are things hidden in these poems that rereading will reveal but that there’s something so spot-on (and interesting and entertaining) about the personality and world the poems evince that rereading the collection illumines what it means to be human. At times, one has the feeling of reading a, say, somewhat inchoate Dream Songs. I’ve read the book through three times, and I see no reason to stop there.

Tags: 7.5 stars, David Sewell, Jon Woodward, Wave Books
Posted in reviews

Kitchen Heat

Monday, October 23rd, 2006

by Ava Leavell Haymon
Louisiana State University Press 2006
Reviewed by David Sewell

If you can’t stand the title…

haymon cover Trees are great. I remember once listening to some geezer prattle on, going as far as to call them amazing. He further established his geezerness by adding, “Their merely being there means something; that soon we may touch, love, explain.” I must say that I was a little taken aback—we had just met and already he was being this forward with me. But that is, perhaps, heading too far down the wrong road.

Trees are great because, where I’m from (earth), they’re disabused of their leaves every fall, and every spring new leaves fill the trees like so many green birds returned from their winter quarters. Related or not to this photoperiodic process, the trees themselves grow year to year, reaching higher and higher into the sky, thrusting farther and farther away from the niggling concerns of us human beings. Really, trees are something amazing.

But poets are not trees. Perhaps not all people who write poems are poets, but perhaps that has nothing to do with our purpose here (I’ll let you know when I find out what that is). Ava Leavell Haymon is a woman with an interesting name who lives in Louisiana and writes poems about small things that, by the peculiar alchemy that is poetry, become larger. Whether this is a trick of the light, whether mirrors and small German children named Hans who have a smoking habit are involved, or whether an actual chemical change has been effected is a question that will take some time to address. But first, lest you, dearest reader who has taken a break from looking at pornography, think I’m a lunatic with a thing for trees, let’s get back to the idea of the first paragraph.

Most or many of the poems in this book, which is not a selected or collected, were written and published a long time ago (some even in journals that are still extant). As the acknowledgments reveal, one poem was published in a journal in 1985. That’s over twenty years ago, to you and me. Many poems were published in the eighties, many in the nineties—including a good chunk culled from chapbooks published in 1991 and 1994.

Why is this at all relevant? Because this is 2006, and including poems from so far back, which one of the blurb writers amusingly refers to as “her marvelous new poems,” says something about the poet, the publisher, and the poems. (As a person who enjoys comedy writing, I usually take the time to read the backs of poetry books.) And it’s not like Haymon hasn’t published a book in the past twenty years—she just published one (coming in at a scant 52 pages) in 2004.

This sort of curatorial anachronism argues any number of points: that the poems’ quality is of the timeless variety, that their concerns are of the timeless variety, that, perhaps, the poems have been collected around a particular theme, rather than just collected from some period in her writing career. It also suggests that the poet hasn’t been doing much writing lately.

Haymon’s poems deal with her relationships—with her husband (largely the first section, “Choosing Monogamy”), with others when she was a child (largely the second section), and with her children when they were growing up (largely the third section). The poems are full of characters, most of them family members. Grandma may be in Boca now instead of a chaise on the first floor and little Cindy may have become emancipated at fourteen instead of marrying a plow, but the basic paradigms of these relationships have not moved much. My point: 20-year-old poems about familial relations shouldn’t necessarily feel dated today—even if the escaped lunatics who fill the radio and television airwaves with their ravings are right that our culture is coming apart like a Kazakhstani space shuttle on reentry (disclosure: they’re not).

The poems in the first section of the book take some interesting turns: “On the screen in a darkened movie house, my own breasts / glowed back at me from a dressing-room mirror” (“Rare Night Out”). “I bring a rhinoceros with me,” she writes in “Endangered Habitat,” a villanelle (which is actually pronounced “guzzle”) about desire and monogamy. The poems chew on monogamy and all its requisite ingredients/themes, as poets sometimes do, by employing the imagination. We have the beloved’s body parts, the acts of eating (sometimes, understandably, the beloved’s body), hunting and fishing (in the literal and the metaphoric sense), a phallic rhinoceros horn. Monogamy is difficult she seems to be saying, especially when rhinoceroses are involved. “The only trouble with monogamy / is that it’s not what we long for / and know we can never have.” Word.

The poems in the section also, regrettably, take a few ho-hum turns. “I want to rub your hands / between mine. I want to rub / your back and legs with / cedar-smelling oils,” from “Choosing Monogamy”), adds up to not exactly Justin Timberlake-¬sexy territory (though, in truth, Justin is just now bringing sexy back—these poems, being as old as they are, were no doubt written at a time when sexy was missing [presumably, it had burrowed deep into Burt Reynolds’ mustache]). And that’s a bit of a problem when the section is, more or less, about sex. But, a few other light missteps aside, the section is a successful monograph on monogamy.

“My grandmother sent me out to get the eggs,” begins the poem “First Grandchild Breaks the Egg with No Shell,” a typical enough poem for the second section. A common rural event makes the turn to violence and potential life lessons:

Next morning I saw our breakfast eggshells,
crushed, in a saucer in the bright chicken yard.
The hens were pecking at them,
eyeing me—standing on one foot
outside the fence—with the lidless gaze
chickens turn on the enemy.

Other themes of this section: grandparents and uncles, Sunday school and lost teeth, old photographs, family recipes, Christmases, birthdays—simple things all, but decent fodder for these sorts of poems.

The third section is again a bit adventurous, relatively speaking—lines stretch to the end of the page, alignments go wacky, the character Denmother (a sort of everymom/antimom) makes several appearances. A sonnet about her daughter cheekily begins, “She’s 14.” (The preceding poem talks about her son at thirteen years old. Unfortunately, the poem about her daughter is the fifteenth in the section, and the one about her son is the fourteenth. Oh well.)

This line from “Invocation,” which begins the last section, explains a lot of what Haymon’s up to in the book: “Inhabit my kitchen: / It’s here, only here / I can believe and not recoil. / Here, if anywhere, time stills.” Will do.

Again, most of the poems in the section, as in the rest of the book, are about small things: carving a pumpkin, domestic rituals, family vacations. But Haymon does manage to make interesting poetry out of the mundane, and her perspective is brave and honest (she says of her son, “he floods me through with Queen Jocasta’s joy”). The poems—which heavily favor standard syntax, complete sentences, images and a strong narrative element—are well crafted and, with the passing of time, I’d assume, they’d gain in significance.

It’s clear that this is not the poetry of the future, and I have my doubts that it’s even the poetry of the present. Then again, deserts in the American West are littered with thousands of quartz Ozymandiases that once stood as tall trees.

Tags: 5.5 stars, Ava Leavell Haymon, David Sewell, Louisiana State University Press
Posted in reviews

My Brother is Getting Arrested Again

Wednesday, September 27th, 2006

by Daisy Fried
U. of Pittsburgh Press 2006
Reviewed by David Sewell

So What?

fried cover There’s no doubt that Daisy Fried’s second book, My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again, will be warmly received by the seven people in America who still read poetry these days (disclosure: I’m not one of them). And—to prove that this review isn’t being dictated straight from my subconscious to a clairvoyant Mayan child-cum-secretary née cast-off from Mel Gibson’s upcoming romantic comedy Apocalypto—the book was, in fact, a finalist for the 2005 James Laughlin Award, which, apparently, is some sort of scheme the not-completely sozzled contingent at the Academy of American Poets cooked up to snooker authors with two books in the sack into accepting a lock of the late publisher’s well-connected hair. I realize, then, that, by writing the following review, I’m risking damnation, or at least less brandy in my sidecar at the next Academy mixer. Yet, a decent swimmer me, I’ll continue.

Fried has a talent for writing highly readable lyrical poetry that, in the words of fictitious movie drunk Arthur Bach, doesn’t suck. Fine. But what about the tops of those seven heads filled with poetry (see above)? Might we inquire how they’ll fare? Well, they’re safe, I’d say. Neither form nor content is being pushed very far in this book. Likely, a pleasant afternoon will be passed in the company of these poems, but few lives will be changed or bothered much by them.

Fried, with a refreshing lack of concern for the dryness of her simple shoes, does wade often into the ebb tide of childhood and adolescence. From there, she reports on and inhabits the types of characters that, according to Fried, dwell in that realm. Too often, though, there’s not much new to be uncovered, unless you think a by-the-numbers description of an adolescent boy (which is the whole of the poem “First Boyfriend, 14”) is uncharted territory. (Okay, she does compare him to a minotaur; but too little, too late.)

Fried bravely pays much effort to making her scenes vivid. She seems to prefer the eye of the painter or filmmaker—we see the concern for lighting à la, say, Edward Hopper, “Sunlight gaps into the room” (“Go to Your Room”), as well as concern for the most niggling details: “Her eyelash brush has left / its own celestial smudge over one brow” (“Broken Radios”) or “oldtimey accordion music / on the back-wall jukebox, its sliding lights, / heatless not-hearth blinking against sapped / north latitude winter window sun” and “The man / in dirty suede” (The Drunkard’s Bar”). The idea must be that all these details amount to something—some reflection of life today, its obsessions and devotions, its predilections and variations, to help us make sense of how her characters and personalities fit into and navigate such a world, and, therefore, to gain a better, at least different, understanding of these our modern times for ourselves. But, too often, there’s the feeling that these details are irrelevant or not much more than ballast.

Admittedly, most of the poems feature fairly well sketched-out scenes (as the above quotations indicate) in which fairly well sketched-out characters talk and act and interact. That said, the poems, while mostly well executed, seem a bit too easy-listening, at least for me, my expectations, and my fourteen dollars.

Her attempts at political poems are a different story—at best, they’re regrettable. “The Hawk,” a response to the renewal of the Patriot Act, did not have to be written, and its inclusion is the closest the book ever came to causing me any sort of consternation. The poem doesn’t quite achieve what the idea seems to require, and it wasn’t a very strong idea to begin with. (Take a guess what/who the hawk stands for; a dove appears later in the book, multiplying into nine or ten doves—all of which is, I think, a little heavy-handed, obvious, and lacking in artfulness.)

The “Hawk” poem is both inaccurate (why, for instance, call the hawk’s squirrelly meal “plunder”?) and, in a strange twist, unfairly hard on males: the poem features a male tourist who “grabs” at his wife’s “wrist knobs” and “gabbles a strange language, transfixed”; a little boy who is willing to break his mother’s fingers (which are trying to lead him away) to see the bird eat its meal (the bird has alighted on a monkey bars of all places—get it?); and a man—an ex-hunter, whatever that is—who practically salivates at the scene. Weird.

The other overtly political poem, “American Brass,” takes too long to dramatize that the speaker has conflicted feelings about being an American in a foreign country. This speaker is in France, watching an American high school marching band at the same time that the bombing of Afghanistan is beginning (a fact that’s reinforced by the spineless inclusion of the relevant dates [one just pre- and one just post-9/11] at the end of the poem, though the fact is fairly clear at that point). The poem is mostly clumsy and doesn’t really pass the “So what?” test—it certainly doesn’t stand up to the terrible events of 9/11, which is a risk every artist runs and few, if any, have avoided.

What else? There’s a poem (“Three Times Only”) about the instances in which she has seen her husband cry, yet there’s nothing particularly poignant or memorable in the poem. And there’s one about how, once, when waiting for the Metro, vexed by extreme heat and heavy shopping bags, she remembers a time when she was ten and saw a train that was lit up on the inside and didn’t stop. (The poem is called “In a Station of the Metro.” Hmm. Remakes rarely work. Though, at least she didn’t name one, “The Waste Land.”) The poem then tortures syntax to arrive at the point (I think) that the train represents for her “inexorability’s ease,” and she knows she can never get on that train. Uh, okay.

There are better poems in the book. “Doll Ritual”—which introduces the character/doll Ti-Anne, who/which reappears in the book, though not quite enough—is strange and exciting. The poem is one of the many from the perspective of a child, and one of the few that works. (The same tactic doesn’t work as well in “Jubilate South Philly: City 14” and “Running while Screaming,” for instance.) “Envy” takes chances and pays off, and “The Conference Notes” is a complicated and rewarding slide show of a longer poem.

But, ultimately, I’m left thinking about the poems that widely miss the mark. In the poem “Used One Speed, Princeton,” in which the speaker lets her mind wander while she tools around on her bicycle, we get this: “The houses dim, colors of soap, the shaped kind / you put in little dishes, that shrink and melt / to goo.” And the interestingly titled “Pablo Picasso Was Never Called an Asshole” quickly loses steam: “Clubs like erections / locked down over their steering columns.” On the other hand, the book’s cover art is delightful.

Tags: 4 stars, Daisy Fried, David Sewell
Posted in reviews