Microreviews
Sakura Park
Rachel Wetzsteon
Persea Books, $16.50 (paper)
Rachel Wetzsteon’s inheritance from W.H. Auden (she’s the author of Influential Ghosts: A Study of Auden’s Sources) is nowhere more apparent than in her third collection. Just as in Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” where life goes on as Icarus plunges into the sea, Wetzsteon has set a tale of personal heartbreak against the bustling, vivid life of New York City. The city cares nothing about the speaker’s pain, but stands in beautiful and sometimes useful contrast, as in one poem in which the red light of an ambulance stands in for the speaker’s heart: “the siren [her] pain made public.” Sakura Park is as much an ode to the city as it is a documentation of love and loss, and Wetzsteon does a marvelous job of playing the flaneur, portraying the multifarious sights and sounds of Manhattan. She loves her city, with its “precise roughmusic . . . terror and truth”; she also loves classic movies, Shakespeare, and playing with rhyme, which reminds us again of Auden, who also delicately fuses the world of the everyday with the mysterious realm of perfectly pitched rhythms: “Late October; the days grow shorter; / cobalt shadows troubled the water.” Wetzsteon’s play with sound and rhyme is a welcome relief from the sometimes overweening tale of romantic loss (“Oh heart that aches / and trust that breaks”). If any criticism can be made of the collection, it is that the poet dwells a little too obsessively on her break-up. But the speaker seems to know this, and in finding her sorrow mirrored in a friend’s, she conjures empathy and compassion to soften her reproach: “But who am I to / criticize? Her tale’s my own.” The book ends on a note of peaceful optimism, giving way to the promise that there is life beyond “the jerk that left her”: “There is still a chance the empty gazebo / will draw crowds from the greater world // And meanwhile, meanwhile’s far from nothing / the humming moment, the rustle of cherry trees.”
—Amy Newlove Schroeder
Standing in Line for the Beast
New Issues Press, $14 (paper)
Pain Fantasy
Red Morning Press, $12 (paper)
both by Jason Bredle
Reading Jason Bredle’s two full-length books is like engaging in a hysterical, witty, confusing, irritating, and rather one-sided conversation: these are poems that display a restless verbal energy that is entertaining and occasionally exhausting. Pop culture detritus abounds, as do narrative, visual, and tonal juxtapositions reminiscent of those found in the works of other chatty and slightly surreal contemporary poets. Bredle pushes the style in his own direction, as with the poem “Horse for President,” which reads (unsurprisingly, given the title) like a press release from a horse announcing its candidacy for president. Said horse claims, among other things, to have been the victim of a conspiracy when he was caught skimming money and, later, sexually assaulting a chicken. There is an intentionally tin-eared bombast running throughout these books, a grandstanding that deflates itself in the absurdity of the conceits. Bredle himself provides a worthwhile explanation of the style in “The Classic Story”: “these are the days of our post-whimsical, / neo-absurdist lives, in which our goal / has become surviving each hour without / breaking down publicly.” The success of many of these poems rests on Bredle’s ability to find these occasional plateaus in the chaos, where he can let something human sneak through. For instance, in a poem about Wilhelm Roentgen, discoverer of X-rays, the poet supposes asking the scientist “why he leapt so blindly into the swirling unknown,” then imagines “he’ll say he just couldn’t take it anymore.” A similar turn comes at the end of “So Everybody Wants to Know Where You Go When You Die.” The poem natters on for fifty lines, cartoonishly describing creatures on a farm (the farmer included) racing and riding one another toward the sound of a dinner bell, all wacky, repetitive fun, and hyperventilation-inducing lines, until “this winter, we’ll sell/our farm to Wal-Mart.” The speaker imagines himself standing in the store, “near mitts in sporting goods,” remembering the sound of his wife “yelling come and get it into the deep blue gloaming / of our forever encroaching darkness.” This sad and sudden reverie may legitimize the wind-up—When we die we go to Wal-Mart?!—or else it does not. But the payoff is usually worth the hijinks, because one always gets the sense of something desperate at stake just beneath the surface of the poems. Among the best poems of the two books is “On the Way to the 53-B District Court of Livingston County, October 1, 1999.” The poem organizes itself around the simple repetition, “It begins,” which allows Bredle to push the poem wherever his imagination takes him. “It begins while eating something extremely / erotic.” Or: “It begins with / $148.77 worth of phone calls.” And later: “No, no. Scratch all that. It begins / when a gray cat walks into your house and falls / asleep on a green jacket.” The accumulation of odd and novel narrative fragments eventually creates a cohesive and heartbreaking whole. That the poem never reveals what that mysterious “it” is proves a wise decision, allowing the reader room to fill in the gaps, though in its final lines the poem assures us that “It begins / when you see over a dozen swans swimming / toward you, and it never ends.” Some readers may not have the patience to wade through the verbal pratfalls that litter these two books, let alone their predilection for diarrhea as a subject. And Bredle doesn’t always hit the mark satisfactorily, though this seems more a forgivable willingness to fail while trying than an actual failure. Occasionally, these poems can be devastating. More often, they make for strange and memorable company.
—Charlie Clark
Kluge: A Meditation,and other works
Brian Kim Stefans
Roof Books, $13.95 (paper)
With an erudite wit, a swerving, campy, sonic thickness, and an adherence to recombinatory exercises in the subversion of style, Kluge, a companion piece to What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (2006), reads like a handbook for the future avant-garde. The book merges the erstwhile artistic breakthroughs of the Black Mountain School and Oulipo-inspired procedural methods with a forward-looking faith in digital aesthetics to concoct a poetry as flat-out funny as it is furiously intelligent. The impressive range of this collection is sure to engender excitement as it cracks open received ideas of structure and form. Stefans works within the serial mode in both prose and verse, tackles the long poem through a decimation of individual words (“‚Ķh / is awa / reness // of re / ality / as und / erstoo / d by o / the rs”), takes the verse play to hilarious poignancy, and schools Chomsky on the finer points of poetic meaning and logic. He creates a post-language poetry honoring pre-linguist utterance by giving import to the verbal hiccups that allow one time to gather and articulate a thought and explicates its techniques with short but useful essays. “Old songs are idle echoes,” Stefans writes in the book’s brilliant title piece, “like anthems penned on a desert isle.” He is himself a tireless critic, and one entirely deserving of the same recognition and intellectual rigor he’s brought to bear on the work of numerous other writers, a decade’s worth of which appears in his recent Before Starting Over. The scope of his cultural references and the lightning speed with which they shift, dancing between seemingly incommensurate lexicons, evinces a media-heavy, in media res “Ballet carnival,” where the dialectic between high and low art is not only proved irrelevant, but antiquated. Whatever future term comes to stand in for that which follows postmodernism, one can rest assured that this particular poet will be a prime example of its practitioners, as Stefans tell us: “Postmodernism’s dead. Let’s collect its guppies.”
—Noah Eli Gordon
On the Vanishing ofLarge Creatures
Susan Hutton
Carnegie Mellon University Press$14.95 (paper)
“Time passes, and this is its virtue.” This is how Susan Hutton decribes a young man in the hospital where she gave birth, his brain tumor eating away at his memory, so that he keeps forgetting he is dying. “He had never been there. He had been there all summer.” In her debut collection, Hutton focuses on the fundamental question of history—What part of now will be remembered later?—and shows how people are almost always too close to their own lives to say. In “First Glance,” the Lumi¯(r)re Brothers, having made some of the earliest motion pictures, decide there’s no future in this technology, since “people . . . could see the same thing on the street.” And indeed, it’s life’s continuous wave of new experiences that haunts our answers to that question. In “My List,” Hutton notes that one’s sorrow can be “replaced by births, the smell of summer weeds, / a list of little happinesses.” Her list ends with how the Mayflower, after sailing home to Europe, “was dismantled and made into a barn. / No one remembers which barn it was.” Hutton’s poems are plain-spoken and matter-of-fact, consistently quiet, even as they register both the hushed awe of parenthood and the lingering shock of a friend’s suicide. While many poets’ first books house a menagerie of styles, forms, and concerns, Hutton’s brief poems (few stretch past half a page) are tightly unified in both tone and theme. The intensity is well sustained, though what may be missing is variety, a wider range. Still, Hutton’s best poems combine odd angles on familiar bits of history with a nuanced attention to the in-the-moment happenings of her young family. When a friend asks, after her twins’ birth, “Don’t you wonder what they’ll be like?” she answers, “No, I don’t want it to be over.” The question of what will matter, Hutton suggests, is for future generations. For the living, everything matters. Perhaps the best response is to create things that will outlive us, the way “An old man plants an olive grove knowing / it won’t bear fruit for decades.” Or the way people live on through their children, who in turn will have children. “Even at two,” Hutton points out, “my daughter’s hips turn tenderly outward.”
—Matthew Thorburn
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