The Day the World Ends: A Diamond in the Rough

In honor of National Poetry Month (yes, I am aware that was April…) I read Ethan Coen’s The Day the World Ends. An interesting read to say the least, this collection of poems is as imaginative as it is diverse.

I can’t say that I was impressed by the book overall. Too many of the poems were about sex and didn’t seem to take themselves seriously. Perhaps I take poetry too seriously, but I just didn’t find the level of beauty (either traditional or tragic) that I hope to get out of a book of poetry. Coen is certainly able to fit words into rhyme schemes and come up with some clever limericks, but I was missing the profound nature of poetry that I have come to love (although I am impressed that he chose to do a whole section of limericks, which are largely ignored by professional poets). The collection felt like it was aiming at the honesty of Bukowski’s work but it was missing the underlying emotion.

This said, there were several passages and poems that I feel are truly inspired. In fact, I loved these little gems enough that I would definitely read any other poetry collections that Coen publishes in the hopes that he continues to develop this particular facet of his style. Here are some of my favorites:

From “We Sheep”:

“Does wisdom fret at what’s in store

And boggle at what’s gone before–

Or rather does it not, like us,

Do what it must, and nothing more?” (p. 15)

From “The Word is Not the Thing”:

“A poem is not about things.

It is a thing.

The one thing in which

The word is the thing.” (p. 95)

“Perspective”:

“Below are pluming clouds; below

Them, roads and patchwork fields.

Whenever I in airplanes go

I see a truth revealed:

Lord God prefers soft edges;

He hazily defines,

While men square off the hedges

And travel in straight lines.” (p.110)

From “Woman”:

“‘You imagine

That Woman is a dense body of water

Which you peer at through a rippling skin,” (p. 113)

But some of Coen’s more lighthearted verses are equally enjoyable. Here are a few of his funnier quips:

From “Elegy for a Waterbug–and Ourselves”:

“What?!

You scramble, manic Jesus on the sea,

And meet and start to scale the toilet wall.

Aghast, I press the lever that will be

The trigger for a lethal waterfall…” (p. 116)

From “Limericks”:

“The thing cannot but breed complications,

Not to speak of genetic mutations.

Any woman who bears

Her own grandchildren shares

Much too much with the next generations.” (p. 33)

From “On Turning Fifty”:

“All right, so this poem wasn’t about turning fifty so much

As about your forties, your miserable forties.

But if I’d called the poem ‘Skip your Forties, Fuckers,’

Would you have read it?” (p. 76)

From “A New Poem!”:

“I can feel it,

A new poem

Stirring in its lair,

Roused from slumber by

The whipcrack of a fresh idea.

I can hear it, hear

Its echoing moans, and

Imagine it

Unfolding and stretching mighty limbs and

Blinking mucus from its glittering eyes.

Yes, a big’un–

Oh, you can just tell.

“Hail, poem, think I

As I feel it rolling to its feet and

Taking its first unsteady steps

Inside my head;

Hail, great grand baying

Awe-inspiring verse of mine,

Finding your balance,

Readying to lumber forth from deep gestation-cave,

Eager to thump your chest and

Stomp fearlessly across the page.

Hail, high howling thing, whose footfalls

Now draw nigh,

Hail to thee, magnificent–

“Bald Chicken?” (p.102)

Coen is at his best when he is describing abstract ideas and using enjambment to punctuate his message. I hope that, in future publications, he continues to experiment with enjambment to make each poem as strong as possible.

I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl: A Heart Wrenching Portrait of a Young Life Lost

Some books insist that you read slowly, that you savor each word and each turn of phrase, appreciating the way in which the author has crafted the story. This is one of those books. Kelle Groom’s background in poetry is highly visible throughout the story, which also carries a narrative that weaves in and out of time, revealing the years that Groom lived without knowing the truth behind her son’s early death.

As a teenager, Groom became heavily involved with alcohol. Before she was twenty, she became pregnant with a son, Tommy, who she gave to her aunt and uncle to raise. Fourteen months later, Tommy died. Throughout the rest of her life Groom wonders what went wrong during those fourteen months, whether or not she could have prevented the cancer that took his life, and how to create a stable life for herself free of alcohol and regret.

Title and Cover: The title suits the story perfectly, revealing the poetic nature of the writing but still hitting on a scene in the novel that is important to Groom. Unique, this is a title and cover that should catch attention of shoppers at bookstores.

Plot Structure: The plot is more Groom’s emotional journey than actual events that occur, but of course there is a timeline. This timeline is a little difficult to follow sometimes, as the story jumps in and out of time often and sometimes without warning. This doesn’t take away from the beauty of the prose, though, and is easy enough to recover from once you get your bearings. Staying in a constant state of wonder does coincide with the experiences that Groom is retelling, so this jumpy structure works on a larger level, though it makes readers work (which isn’t a bad thing).

Overall, this is a bittersweet story of a woman who makes the journey from floundering alcoholic teenager to talented, understanding woman. Along the way Groom shares the experiences that teach her to forgive others, to forgive herself, and to open her life to the poignancy that comes with the understanding of how the lowest points in our lives can define who we become.

I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Going on Somewhere: A Myriad of Emotions

Poetry is something that can capture the imagination in a way that novels and other forms of prose cannot. The modernist idea of form following function is certainly applicable to some texts, adding another dimension to the design of a book. But the use of meter and rhyme have the potential to be crafted in such a way that allows readers to intuitively connect with the poem. This is the quality that makes you hold your breath as you savor the lines that resonate with your own experience.

Karin Gustafson’s Going on Somewhere certainly has such moments. A collection of often poignant verse, Going on Somewhere taps into the many different emotions that a person experiences as they progress through the phases of life.

I will admit that I had a rather difficult time getting into the book– I don’t know if this was because I just wasn’t in a poetry mood or if the pace was a bit off– but once I got into it at around page 13 I finished the collection in 2 sittings (only because sleep pulled me away). After reading Charles Bukowski not too long ago I was immediately hit with how different his and Gustafson’s work are. When it comes to narration you have 2 writers who are on different ends of the spectrum: Bukowski is very narrative and Gustafson spends her time embracing the moment and the emotions it contains. Though I adore Bukowski’s work, and find it very entertaining, I found that Gustafson was able to strike a deeper chord with me, emotionally.

Going on Somewhere combines delicate yet subtle rhymes and forms with vivid images, creating poetry whose meaning stands above its meter. After reading several of the poems I had to go back to even see if they rhymed, as they flowed so effortlessly that I wasn’t sure whether or not Gustafson had written within a limited meter. This, to me, is wonderful writing, because Gustafson has manipulated her words in a way that lets them overshadow the rhyme schemes that contain them. The best word to describe this would be “natural.” She is a natural writer whose thoughts naturally translate wonderfully into poetry.

Though I love the writing that the book contains, there are two things that bugged me about the book itself. First: the illustrations. They aren’t high resolution and they look a bit faded–this didn’t mesh well with the crispness of the writing, the clear images that it already projected. Additionally, the illustrations didn’t add anything to the book, they just distracted from the writing and made it seem kind of childish (though the content is certainly anything but). Had they been left out of the book altogether it would have been easier to read.

Second: the organization of the book (come to think of it, this might be what caught me off guard when I first started reading). Though I’m sure that great care was taken to order the poems in a way that created balance, it wasn’t intuitive to me. Several of the poems discuss sexual issues and their raw language stood out too much amongst the rest of the work. Now, I don’t think that these poems should have been left out, they add an important dimension to the collection, but I think that they should have been sequenced in a way that didn’t juxtapose them with some of the more innocent pieces. This juxtaposition could be sending a message, but the interruption in the flow of the book was too noticeable–even if it was there to prove a point.  

Two of my favorite pieces in the collection are “The Last Thing” and “Thin Birthday.” “The Last Thing” brought me to tears and I have read it several times in just the last couple of days. “Thin Birthday” was also heart wrenching, but in a different way. I think that these two poems showcase where Gustafson’s strength as a writer lies: in the delicate balance between emotions. These two poems are both sad, but they are sad in different ways. Capable of fine tuning the differences between poignant and bittersweet, Gustafson has talent when it comes to invoking emotion.

Going on Somewhere is available in paperback at Barnes and Noble’s website. To read more of Karin Gustafson’s work, you can visit her blog.

I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Slouching Toward Nirvana: An Unsettling Narrative

When it comes to poetry, Charles Bukowski is his own breed. A man who loved his craft yet resented its effect on his life (as deduced from this volume of poems), the tension in Bukowski’s life is evident from the beginning of this collection.

Title: The title is taken from one of the poems in the collection and it is a wonderful description of his literary journey. It also plays up the dichotomous nature of his writing, the push and pull between the honesty of his work and the fake industry that promotes it– a theme that permeates the book from beginning to end.

Cover: I like the colorful design and the font, but the circles could really be anything; it looks good, but doesn’t have any real connection to the content. Unless, of course, you relate the green and purple circles to the dichotomy that was just mentioned, but I think that might be a bit of a stretch. Also, the cover doesn’t represent enough tension or power for it to really tie in with that theme.

Character Development: I know that this isn’t a narrative novel, but in reality Bukowski develops himself as a writer and as a subject throughout the length of the book. Published posthumously, this edition chronicles some of his work from his early 20s to the end of his life and, over that time, Bukowski certainly developed as a writer and as a person. His abilities to look deeper into seemingly mundane events and objects certainly focused over the course of his career.

Style: The narrative quality of each poem surprised me. It has been a few years since I have read any of Bukowski’s work and I immediately remembered why I was so fond of it to begin with– it engages the reader with concrete details and actual events. Oftentimes poetry deals so fully in abstraction that, no matter how good the writing may be, it is difficult to really pay attention to what you are reading. Bukowski, though, utilizes events, people, and places to address the abstract ideas that are on his mind.

Favorites: The book is broken into 4 parts and I definitely enjoyed the last half of the collection the most. Some of my favorites include: “a clean, well-lighted place” (though this I love mostly because of its reference to Hemingway and tie in with his short story of the same name), “the curse,” “open here,” “something’s knocking at the door,” “regardless,” “the swimming pool,” and “working out.”

Epigraphs are included before each part of the collection, and the ones before part 1 and part 3 really stood out to me:

Bach is the hardest to play badly because

he made so few spiritual mistakes.

and

we are all

museums of fear.

Slouching Toward Nirvana is full of great poetry that is both deep and accessible. I highly recommend this to anyone looking for an interesting yet profound read.

Kimbrell Recalls Visions of Outlaws and Lost Love in “Sometimes a Cloud Looks Like a Getaway Car Again”

James Kimbrell’s My Psychic is a great collection of poetry and prose. My personal copy has several highlighted passages, but the one poem that I love the most from the collection is “Sometimes a Cloud Looks Like a Getaway Car Again.” *To enlarge the poem, click on the images. You may want to open the pages in a new window or tab so that you can refer to them.

The first thing that I would like to mention is that I love the fact that the narrator is placing equal blame on both him and his lost love for ruining the relationship. Too many writers focus on the faults of their partner, but this poem recognizes that both lovers are to blame and concentrates only on a broken heart, a sense of regret that is as amorphous as the clouds, and a special memory that has stolen a piece of the narrator’s soul only like true love can. The central idea of Bonnie and Clyde works wonderfully; just as the outlaws stole and killed, love stole and killed. The love that the narrator is missing stole his happiness, stole a part of his innocence, and ultimately killed a little piece of him that has lived on with the beautiful woman he has lost (she must have been beautiful, right, to warrant him stealing anything for her love?).   

I particularly like the highlighted passage in the first stanza (lines 3-8). The imagery in this poem, as a whole, is phenomenal, but this passage in particular brings a vaguely remembered historical tale to life– resurrects memories of an old love and equates them with a new, if fleeting, romance. The first stanza of the poem is bursting with possibility, and this idea that anything could happen is carried on throughout the poem, even to the end and despite the fact that the relationship is already over. The clouds bear signs of matrimony, the narrator holds a stolen gardenia in his hand, uncertain of the future but ready to embrace it every step of the way. Even when the narrator acknowledges, in the second stanza on page 20, lines 3-5, that the relationship is over, he still holds onto the possiblity of seeing her again, even if it is just introduce her to her own absence.

The line breaks that Kimbrell uses are perfect and hint at a rhyme scheme, but form here is both as solid and as tenuous as the love the narrator is missing. In fact, the whole poem has a dreamlike quality, one that is highly influenced by the way in which the clouds take different shapes and the fact that hope remains in a broken heart. Almost childlike in nature, this piece combines the mature ability to look back on a loss and see it for what it was with the childlike ability to see more potential in the situation than there really is. A poignant poem full of heartache, regret, yet oddly enough a sense of hope, “Sometimes a Cloud Looks Like a Getaway Car Again” is easily one of my favorite poems and the best piece in Kimbrell’s collection, My Psychic.