by Dave Morrison,
Moon Pie Press, 2009,
74 pages, paperback, $10.00,
ISBN: 978 -1 – 61539 – 452 – 4
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Dave Morrison crafts tall poetry with an XL talent and the assessing gaze of an expert onlooker, poems with an all – over texture — part chamois and part steel wool.  With an eye for detail and a bottom line that takes language for a ride, Morrison doesn’t keep it level and moving at one speed but guns it, puts it through loops and dives and steep climbs, reeling into witty, often very funny poems full of simplexity, kidding and not kidding at once — I am jealous of the dead for / their reduced workload — as he strives to make sense of life.

Every line feels cared about, really meant, subjected to crash – testing, even moments of heart – rending beauty.  If there’s an overriding theme it is that of an Everyman filled with the aspiration for recognition and personal ripening; a drive toward self – acceptance and fulfillment, always wondering how to shake the feeling that you’re always one day late.  These poems acknowledge the ever -present possibility of failure, conflicts never quite resolved, the high cost of breaking even, how a howl won’t heal the / scar, but it helps the  / bleeding, lights a match, that even if we fail, we must keep trying to fail better.

Morrison’s poems reference a wide range of interest in and knowledge of science, ancient history, music, and pop culture. He’s one of those rare writers who appear to know a lot about a lot, whose work puts a contemporary spin on the classical ideal of poetry as both informational and highly entertaining: serious poetry that doesn’t crush us with high seriousness.

Though many of the poems are political, they’re never the God – awful preachy diatribes that John Keats loathed for their having a palpable design on us.  Morrison doesn’t take an

I – know – better – than – you proselytizing tone with us.  He never looks down from above.

Too many poets these days seem not to have read much poetry, are unfamiliar with the history of the form and content, and have not absorbed the lessons of the masters — and for that, there’s a tangible hollowness in their work.  Morrison has done his homework: Look at this excerpt from his “Care to Join?” — a mordant, satiric take on crowd behavior in all its wonted irrationality worth chapters of sociological analysis.

As the mad group inevitably becomes large and wealthy and powerful and sooner / or later starts to rot from the / inside out, everyone in it

                      starts to lose their

          humanity, starts to get paranoid

          and brutal, starts to lose their ability to

          recognize bad choices and

          repulsive behavior, and starts to think

          that they are better than anyone else, and that

          anyone not in the group isn’t worth a

          damn, and they become this huge slobbering

          thing that just eats and shits and eats and shits

          and eats, and sooner or later this group becomes like

          a drunken sumo wrestler, so that it either topples itself

          or is brought down by a smaller leaner more determined

          foe, who then begins to eat and shit and eat and shit, and

          we never learn anything

          and it just goes on forever and makes you lose faith in

          the human race, so no, thanks, I’d just as soon not join.

Remind you of anyone?  Think Jonathan Swift, his vitriolic disgust for the Yahoos.

Lastly, I want to recommend this poet for the variety of his craft. Morrison is able to write lines that free – fall through history, clutching at twigs of the long – gone and the passing – by to render moments of deep resonance and beauty.  There’s something for everyone, every taste: a splendid sonnet, “Unlikely Sonnet;” “Camaro,” a poem in perfect tetrameter; poems that show a fine ear for unobtrusive rhyme; and the wild and surprising wordplay of “Drums Along the Interstate.”

Definitely one of the best new books of poetry, a must read.

                                                                           — Ted Bookey

by Nick Lantz,
Graywolf Press, 2010,
96 pages, paperback, $15.00,
ISBN: 978 -1 – 55597 – 552 – 4
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During the years of Bush the younger, you may remember, verse arose from an unlikely source: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose evasive rationalizations for the war in Iraq were ironically, angrily circulated as “poetry.”  Most infamous was his breakdown of intelligence into three categories: Known knowns, or what we know we know; known unknowns, the things we know we don’t know; and finally, the key to his defense: unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

The thing is, from a general ontological standpoint, the man’s right: There are limits to our understanding, so much so that we aren’t even aware we aren’t aware.  The outrage of Rumsfeld’s formulation was that he used it to brazenly conceal the truth, rather than illuminate it — used it, you might say, in service to the dark side instead of the light.  His notorious quote is one of two epigraphs that preface a fine first book by Nick Lantz, We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, winner of the 2009 Bakeless Prize.

In deeply empathetic poems, Lantz mulls on the confusion, chaos and fallacy that are so often mankind’s lot, and tries to raise them toward the light.  In unlikely juxtapositions, he poses the hubris of Rumsfeld against the humility of, of all people, Pliny the Elder, ancient Roman author of Natural History and the source of this book’s other headlining observation, that man knoweth nothing unlesse he be taught.  But we can learn our way against the darkness, Lantz thinks.  Clear of voice and generous in spirit, We Don’t Know We Don’t Know is a volume both clever and very wise, its title at once riddle, lament, and mantra.

Lantz begins with a chapter of “Known Knowns.”  In “Ancient Theories,” he lists “knowledge” dubious or disproved: Aristotle’s theory that frogs / formed from mud; the author’s childhood belief that the world spoke / in code through flashing streetlights. In “List of Things We Know,” he details arbitrary and questionable factoids (Kindness / is correlated / to detached / earlobes) and vertiginous exceptions to rules: Unlike most substances, water expands when frozen, and for this reason / . . . we can / go on living.

But beneath the bewildering fortuities, absurdities, and errors, there burns our persistent urge to understand and explain ourselves — to enlighten — and Lantz treats this desperate instinct lovingly, even as it falls short or fails again and again.

The failures are often ominous.  The chapter “Known Unknowns” consists of one long poem called “Will There Be More Than One ‘Questioner’?” — a quote Lantz cites from the 1983 CIA Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual.  What follows is a series of obsessive questions directed to an interrogator.  Some questions are mundane (Have provisions been made for refreshments?), some are horrific (Will you have an unconscious man dragged past the open door at a pre – determined time?), and some hint at an involuntary intimacy (Will you think of him while you eat dark honey smeared on dark bread in a cafe?).

Haunting the “questioner” are the “known unknowns” of fear, dread, and uncertainty about how he will act and respond, how his prisoner will respond and act, and what will come of their humanity.  Ironically, much in those unknowns — Will you risk everything to say [to the prisoner’s wife], He is alive, he is alive? / Will it be true? — is actually within the questioner’s power to decide.

Our very systems of knowing and expressing are inadequate in the chapter “Unknown Unknowns.”  Language is insufficient: In “[                     ],” Eve laments the birth of words and metaphors, how Adam pointed like a retarded child to name creatures and things.  They grow smaller, Lantz writes, each time / she repeats their names.  Truth is precarious, an ironic hazard: A verbal tic makes his aging mother preface her lies with in fact, which her parrot repeats over and over as infect.

But we also might know more than we know.  To Rumsfeld’s three categories, Lantz adds a fourth: Unknown Knowns.  There’s some redemption here, despite so much pathos and futility, as when in “The Sad Truth About Rilke’s Poems,” Lantz assures us that [i]n translation / something / of beauty always dies, but something also is carried over.  In this poem, a purer appreciation of that something might call for a simple shift in awareness:

                                Too many

                                                         people close

          their eyes to listen to your singing, as if it was the light

                      of the fire that burns

                                   and not the heat at the heart of it. 

The final, promising irony is that in exploring the limits of how we grasp that heat, we might, with a little work and grace, know better.

                                                                 — Megan Grumbling

by George Wallace,
Three Rooms Press, 2009,
116 pages, paperback, $15.00,
ISBN: 978-0-9840700-2-2
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I’ve often thought of George Wallace as a sort of psychic channeler, so thoroughly does he inhabit the zeitgeist of this age. Fittingly for a poet well – steeped in Walt Whitman, Wallace writes in the voices of multitudes, a sometimes – risky choice, but one Wallace pulls off with credibility and near – perfect pitch.  His characters are not caricatures.  Though at times broadly drawn, the people who inhabit these poems are accorded respect, even reverence, by a poet whose clear sight is balanced with a deep compassion for the factory worker, the deli clerk, the bartender; for Sally:

          waiting for the number eleven downtown which will take

          her from that waitress job which even with tips and

          kissing ass it doesn’t cover the cost of rent gas groceries

          and electric not to mention a babysitter.

Wallace is not and never has been a “political poet” in the naysaying, finger – wagging, sense of the phrase; neither is he a purveyor of the tiresomely introspective, unstructured work incomprehensible to any but the cognoscenti.  He is, in the spirit of Whitman, the quintessential populist troubadour; a culturally rich historical context pervades his poems; a seemingly organic understanding of the times, the times of our parents and grandparents.

This poetry flowers forth from the real world, though sometimes the “flowers” are scraps of trash blowing along in the exhaust fumes and gutters of a down – and – out city street.  You can almost hear Tom Waits or even Frank Sinatra as a ghostly accompaniment behind these lines:

          This is for the guy on nightshift who never knew

          a minute of financial peace just a working stiff

          sweeping it all up gum sticks candy wrappers

          and white plastic knives sweeping it all up in 

          the rich american night penniless as the day

          he was born smoking too many cigarettes.

With his audacious take on American mythology and the overflowing abundance of his painterly imagination, in his poem “That’s You, Man” Wallace re – contexutalizes characters from American popular culture in the jazziest of recitations:

          see that kid staring into the midway lights?

          see that farm boy hopping off the greyhound?  you!  you

          you you!  you are sexy as a stick of dynamite you are

          tasty as a ballpark wiener you got plenty of mustard on 

          you.  you are stronger than demolition dust you are

          happiest when closed before striking you are horniest

          when your lungs fill up with high grade petroleum 

Wallace writes a hell of a love poem, too — his work can be dizzyingly erotic:

          i loved you once like a fisherman on the edge of

          a river, with his fingers to his lips, tasting the

          morning air for salmon.  i loved you like man

          on a horse entering an undisturbed cove.  like a

          whaler in his scrimshaw dream of hearts and 

          flowers.  like a ship’s mate who catches first

          sight of land.

Wallace’s “New World Love Song” echoes the Song of Songs, with a little Pablo Neruda swirled in:

          i am breaking bread with the angels

          i am walking in the promised 

          land and o my love she is

          a grove of almond trees 

          she is exotic she

          climbs like a

          gypsy wagon

Aptly subtitled, these poems are “new” — so fresh, you can smell the rich, complex soil clinging to their roots — American soil, indeed.  Highly recommended.

                                                                    — Nancy A. Henry