by John Balaban
Copper Canyon Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming
Person as Globe
John Balaban’s talent is for gorgeous narrative and description, and in Path, Crooked Path, the two-time National Book Award nominee navigates classic predicaments: the one against the many, the poetic love of an unaffected world, a society helpless against its governing forces. What develops is a somewhat cynical but sympathetic vision of the American Empire: whether sooner or later, all empires collapse. By stepping in and out of the country, he shows genuine adoration for its place in a fluctuating whole. The book, Balaban’s fifth poetry volume, is a great antidote to a recent avalanche of poetry that confines itself to the function and hope of the 48 contiguous states.
Balaban, a Vietnam vet, shows he’s interested in the current political climate, so long as it’s regarded with the fact that political climates are capricious. In “Looking Out from the Acropolis, 1989,” an early triumph, the poet describes societal reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wall fell to communist and capitalist gasps that “circled the earth for a year/then disappeared through holes in the ozone layer.” By the end, the poem returns to the personal; lamenting the Berlin Wall and other global sorrows, the speaker is drinking vodka with his friend Georgi, a Bulgarian exile:
…Georgi
opened his flask of vodka and poured some on a stone
before we drank our toasts to the new world order
and to whatever muse might come to give us words.
The book covers a range of experiences in Eastern Europe and Southern Asia, so his returns to perspective on the American social climate become all the more engaging. As interested as he is in America’s place in the global, he recognizes that any society is mad with individual people who have individual problems. “Poor Sap” describes a man devastated by the loss of a lover; at first the man contemplates suicide, but eventually he settles for a heroin habit. The oblivion of addiction becomes necessary for the alleged “poor sap” to imagine himself with her again: “From dunes they’d watch gulls teeter/on updrafts above the waves, drifting.”
At least as interesting as Balaban’s original work are his translations of the Romanian poet Stefan Augustin Doinas and the Bulgarian poets Kolyo Sevov, Lyubomir Nikolov, and Alexandra Veleva, which pepper the first and third sections of the book.
Those, and the book’s second section, a short vacation titled “Miami Suite,” show that Balaban’s talent for description is as good as it’s ever been. “Some Notes on Miami” pictures snails that “slide across the air-conditioned glass/as morning sun plunges through our windows” and delves with poise into post-hurricane Florida.
As much as I liked this book, I can’t vouch for its first and worst poem, “Highway 61 Revisited.” Stealing a Dylan title, and employing such a cheap trick as borrowing Dylan lyrics (“That way, down Highway 61”) work to no desirable effect. The poem is nevertheless important because it pictures a contemporary American from the thick of contemporary America; unfortunately, confounding conclusiveness like “the bright empty ribbon of Highway 61,/loud with strange cries echoing across America” feel forced. The poem does offer some nice description, for example, when he’s outside with friends and “the moon has risen over the Sierra Madres”:
shining on burros shuffling through willows, below cottonwoods
along the Rio Grande, glistening on the backs of thumb-size
toads in the stone pans where water seeps in the canyons…
“Highway 61 Revisited” also serves to build an arc to the book’s final poem, “The Great Fugue”; standing opposite the middle aged man in the heart of America, the poem recounts the people that took him in when he was “16 and a runaway,” living in Delaware: “Easter, and I am playing the Grosse Fugue, hearing/the faded voices of those good people.” A life of grace emerges, and you inhabit it when you inhabit these poems. Balaban’s struggle for adoration becomes a sympathetic fusion of the personal and the global: if all empires inevitably progress and disappear, we’re reminded, so do human beings.
*
