Synopses & Reviews
Note from the Publisher:
This book is split into 3 chaps:
The Darkest Bomb by James H Duncan is a slithering romp from a wits end redeemed by a man that is subordinately aware of his subconscious and the reality of what he is facing with each breath he holds.
Sermon From a Thundering Brim by Mat Gould is intently and intensely postured with a manifested recurrence of language that is formidably bred to be “subtly apocalyptic” in the sense that it is “the gospel of which we will always be singing” and regardless of such, there is the inherent presence of life and what must be done to incite it. All this laced with his usual humor, that is if you can laugh at such things.
Happy Hour Madrigals by John Dorsey is seemingly a day in a life of any given day on any someday afternoon, if you often find yourself cheering on the upshot, falling in love with the bar tenderess, swinging at shadows, or simply being a beautiful derelict in a softly sunset lit taproom. These poems have stained glass eyes.
Review
For some time now, I've wanted to write a few lines, simple ones, about John Dorsey's “character poems”; and when I want to write something about someone's writing, then that is pretty much the only time I do a review of any book, no matter how much I “like” it. In other words, if something doesn't trigger some thought in my head about writing and different ways of doing it, I feel like I really have nothing to say about it that couldn't be said better by someone else. Obviously, I lose lots of “friend points” this way, but you have to come up with your own method of keeping your own score. But before I can get to those few simple lines, there are some more general as well as some more specific things that have to go in this bastard for it to qualify as a book review proper.
Spoiler alert: there will be understatement and anti-climax, but there will be threads in the middle that will tie it all together. At the end I will simultaneously satirize the nature of this review while praising John Dorsey, but not everyone will get that part, so I'm explaining it here at the beginning.
2
But, first: James H. Duncan, as it's his poetry that starts off this first volume of a form I like to call “Chap Compendium”, willed into being at the behest of Dog On a Chain Press and Beasely Barrenton Presents.
3
But first: everything. If I have to get intellectual, here, (Let's assume I do. Let's assume that's the point, to some degree, of a book review; especially one that is trying to explain why you might like something; as opposed to just “Fuck Yeah! Etc” or “Fuck this shit! Etc”) I would go out on a limb and say that what all three of these poets are doing is what one might describe as “Minimalism (with a capital M) of the profound.”
What? Well...
There's a tightness here...reminiscent of Carver, tho these poems aren't woodsy or Northwestern enough to be “like” his poems...that your average Bukowski imitator just never...or so rarely that it's pretty much the same thing...ever pulls off. We get tons of poetry like that, submitted to this magazine by writers who play much too sloppily and fast and loose with minimalism.
4
None of that sort of shit, here. Instead this collection starts off loose and fast with Duncan's “Seasick on 46th”
...and then crossing Fifth Avenue as
big dollop raindrops hit the pavement like
face slaps falling from a seasick green
sky casting a surreal dim over the streets
Duncan goes on to deconstruct his own nightmare of traveling through New York. The poem continues as if one big run-on sentence muted by line breaks, each line connecting to the last, creating a sense of momentum not dissimilar to getting sick on a packed bus or subway car. Like a lot of the poems in this book, a lot of this is very dark, but it's not darkness for darkness's sake. There's a restraint that can only be won by lots of reading and writing of poetry and, simply, by looking at the plants, animals, and things of the world and trying not to see through them or past them, but to find some kind of meaning in all of them; or at the very least, attempting to explain what they mean: these, plants, animals, and...
...Insects. Which brings me to the other Duncan piece I'd like to talk about: “Cockroaches and I.”
It begins:
where
in the hell do these
cockroaches
come from?
Simple enough, right? But you didn't think of it, did you? And neither did I. To find fodder for poetry in this just warms me, and, ironically, it seems so human (or at least humanistic) to wonder not only where all these roaches might come from, but what happens when they die, and if some of our deaths aren't so different, really.
If it could happen to them, it could happen to me: just disposed of, really, in the end.
“The Darkest Bomb” is poetry by a poet who knows how to look and how to see things that most of us wouldn't give a second thought to but which, as with roaches' nests, “contain multitudes.”
5
brim noun \ˈbrim\
: the top edge of a glass or a similar container
: the part of a hat that sticks out around the lower edge
1a (1): an upper or outer margin (2) archaic : the upper surface of a body of water
1b: the edge or rim of a hollow vessel, a natural depression, or a cavity
2: the projecting rim of a hat
6
So, you can decide for yourself what a “thundering brim” is. Most of these work pretty well, with the possible exception of the hat.
Mat Gould's contribution to Lantern Lit #1 is made up of even shorter poems. (No “epic two pagers”, as in the case of Duncan.) The kind of shorter poems that are not just about being clever. The kind that seem like they actually have something to say. The kind of little tykes that seem to have had just enough attention paid to them so that they don't end up getting spoiled.
I have not asked the riot to ease up
nor disperse
should it not be allowed to do as it will?...
...the world ends all too often these days-
The above is the beginning 3 lines and the last (great) line from “the following of tanks”, one of Gould's strongest pieces in this collection.
Gould's words have a force and a certainty about them that would come off as clumsy or arrogant if attempted by many writers. Again there's that capital M, here, that thought that nothing more than the most pertinent information must be shared, as in “symbol of a fortune is a coin in the drain”, where he writes:
It is not the blanket that keeps us warm
but
readily
enough
death
keeps us alive
Or the next poem “Over the Counter”, which is about sitting in a diner late at night looking at food, or maybe eating it...there's a crafted ambiguity about the ending that leaves the reader to decide what is meant by hunger and having had enough of it. Either way, the author seems to have a full plate, however you wanna take that.
7
Ok so, ready, here it comes: the big payoff.
The first thing I noticed about John Dorsey's writing; which applies, happily, to every single one of his “Happy Hour Madrigals” is that a lot of his poems are about people other than him. He has a beautiful and elegant knack for telling stories from the sideline, in only as many words as are necessary.
As someone who is by profession forced to read so much bad, solipsistic poetry, that is a nice change.
Share the Road,
J de Salvo