March 10th, 2012
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Review by Michael Meyerhofer
THE MELANCHOLY MBA
by Richard Donnelly
Brick Road Poetry Press
P. O. Box 751
Columbus, GA 31902-0751
ISBN 978-0984100569
2011, 116 pp., $16.00
http://www.brickroadpoetrypress.com/
The Melancholy MBA is the debut collection of Richard Donnelly, and in addition to being timely, it’s also pretty damn impressive. Donnelly’s style is unique in that he manages to break new ground (especially in how his frequent use of caesura forces the reader to take his/her time, really digest the language of these poems) while deftly sidestepping the pretension and unfriendliness all too often found in “experimental” poetry. Put another way, these poems are wonderfully fresh and original yet distinctly human in their accessibility.
The “quiet desperation” famously mentioned by Thoreau is everywhere in these poems, made palatable by wry wit blended with the seething frustration and guilt of Middle Management, America. In “Office Window,” the narrator remarks how he’s just been given “a new office with a window” and, nearing middle age, is finally able to see “Minneapolis sunshine.” One could point out the irony of this, suggesting he could just go outside if he wanted to see the sun, but then you have to wonder how visible the sun would be in the city—not to mention the American ridiculousness of having to choose between a paycheck and sunlight.
Another example is “Jelly Beans,” an early poem in which an unnamed character seems unfazed by the near loss of a “three hundred thousand dollar” account, but sternly questions whether the narrator is the one who has been stealing jelly beans from the jar on his desk. On first read, it’s a funny poem combining the frustration of trying to deal with an incompetent who cares more about safeguarding his sweets than keeping his job. On second glance, though, there’s something sad and familiar about that situation, a bit of human frailty staining the machinery gears. We see this again in “She Tricked,” where we read how an unattractive woman famous for tricking “a man into getting her pregnant” flirts with the narrator, who “[doesn’t] blame her,” perhaps because he recognizes something of his own loneliness and desperation in her actions.
Fans of films like Office Space or even the much darker He Was a Quiet Man will find much that is familiar here, to say nothing of those who themselves have actually worked in factories or offices and experienced firsthand the struggle to maintain individuality in a setting that, perhaps by necessity, wears down the creativity and complexity of the human experience in favor of mechanical productivity. For instance, in “Cabo,” the narrator overhears a group of salespeople being berated like disappointing children, warned that they may lose their “spiffs” if they don’t meet their quota. You can almost see the salespeople hanging their heads, shifting nervously, even though we (like the narrator) have no idea what a “spiff” means in this context.
Those themes continue in “Your Life,” which contains perhaps the book’s most striking scene. There, an obviously dissatisfied narrator contemplates an affair with a woman who claims his life is “so perfect,” but instead of taking decisive action one way or another, he hangs up, clears his schedule, then simply spends “half an hour… staring at the wall.” The poet need provide no further details for the reader to imagine the indecision, excitement, and self-loathing that may be going through the narrator’s mind, all being clear illustrations of the very mortality the narrator both fears and seeks to embrace on the deepest level possible.
However, these poems are not merely concerned with dissecting futility, posing the question of what constitutes a physical or a moral life worth living. Nor is The Melancholy MBA a two dimensional view into the mind of a modern businessman (stereotypically as foreign to most poets as, well, poetry to Wall Street). One of this book’s strengths is its unassuming ambition, plus its ability to maintain verisimilitude while illustrating the paranoia, classism and/or racism interwoven in the business community. “Poor People” is an excellent example (reposted here in its entirety):
there are some poor people
in the world
I see them at the Northland Park
Community Center or
Dell Foods in
Avery
they wear dirty sweatshirts
stained sweat pants old
broken tennis shoes
their hair hangs
around their faces
their oily hair
it’s almost like being crazy
is what it looks like to
me until one of their kids
kicks in your
door at two a.m. and says
crazy
I’ll show you crazy
Some of Donnelly’s best uses of tongue-in-cheek humor occur in poems about the opposite sex, many of which also have some underlying feminist commentary or critique of the human condition. For instance, the sectioned poem “Six Short Poems about Love” begins with a vignette about a woman who refuses to bring the narrator coffee, saying she’ll only do that for her husband, but in fact, “not even for / him.” The rebuke seems playful, though, whereas in “The Good Manager,” a frustrated narrator tries to distance himself from a female employee who seems to be asking for leniency, a raise, and a personal shoulder to cry on, though he finishes by telling her to “button / up the top / of that blouse.” While that poem could be read as a lighthearted critique of an inappropriate worker, an alternate view would be to read the poem’s title satirically, so that the rebuke is how the narrator feels he should respond, for whatever reason, but doesn’t. Perhaps my favorite example, though, not to mention my favorite line from the book, is the beginning of “Sex Poem,” which artfully blends eroticism with measured self-deprecation:
A woman’s body
is a foreign country
and you are not a native
you are a man with a stamped
passport.
Underneath these small, often funny tales of lust, ambition, and petty betrayals, the real strength of these poems is their obsession with mortality, coupled with the absurdity of our daily situation. Somehow, though, Donnelly manages to illustrate all this with the timing, charisma, and lyrical acrobatics of a stand-up comic. The end result is that we not only agree with him, nodding and sometimes laughing as we turn the page, but we feel better (and stronger) for it.
____________
Michael Meyerhofer’s third book, Damnatio Memoriae, won the Brick Road Poetry Book Contest. His previous books are Blue Collar Eulogies (Steel Toe Books) and Leaving Iowa (winner of the Liam Rector First Book Award). He has also won five chapbook prizes. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals, and can be read online at www.troublewithhammers.com.
May 10th, 2011
Review by Michael Meyerhofer
OVERTIME
by Joseph Millar
Eastern Washington University Press
Spokane, Washington
ISBN 0-910055-74-2
2001, 61 pp., $29.99
http://ewupress.ewu.edu
I have always had the deepest admiration for poets who know what to say and what not to say: wordsmiths who sense when it’s time to just shut up and let a scene describe itself, free of heavy-handed pretension. Joseph Millar is such a poet. With wit rivaling that of Tony Hoagland and Stephen Dobyns and a sense of timing and elegance reminiscent of William Carlos Williams, Millar treats the reader to humor and poignant observations complimented by fluid lyricism and superbly orchestrated line breaks. Consider this first stanza from Sitting Bull in Canada, which is about as tight a stanza as any written in the English language:
It’s three years since Little Bighorn,
the Month of Blackening Cherries;
Crazy Horse has been murdered
and civilization keeps rinsing its glittering face in the dawn,
perfecting the treaties and blueprints,
while the railroad pushes its stained fangs
west through the rivers of grass.
In just eight lines, Millar not only sets the stage but uses masterful alliteration and imagery to take a scene that might very well be cliché in the hands of another poet—the tragic mistreatment of Native Americans—and makes it seem not only engaging, but unexpectedly poignant. While some poets surprise us with lyrical end-runs, Millar utilizes an uncompromising, direct approach that sacrifices nothing and astonishes the reader with its heartfelt grace.
Though Millar’s poems often address the lives and attitudes of Middle America, they do so without that air of condescension often present in today’s socially conscious narrative poetry. Put another way, Millar’s poems are the antithesis of snobbery. For instance, in “Autumn Rainfall,” Millar describes a woman who “…makes her supper late, moving slowly / in the bare kitchen, between the entertainment channel / and the glass tray of leftovers bubbling in the oven.”
While these lines contain obvious commentary on the human condition, they provide said commentary in a way that resonates with tenderness and humility. Also, as a matter of style and craft, Millar knows how to calm the reader and engage him/her before elevating his language for the profound observation that follows in the next stanza: “To be brave is to be tired much of the time, / half stunned by the continual dusk.” Now, a lesser poet might have been charmed into beginning the poem with that line, based on its music and meaning, whereas Millar’s approach seems infinitely more affecting because he allows the poem to open with a character, relying on image and description rather than the ruminations of a heavy-handed narrator.
And when Millar does begin his poems with the narrator, he knows the best way to convey a serious point is not to take himself too seriously. One perfect example is “Sunday Night,” a poem about mortality and guilt, that begins on a humorous and unassuming note: “This is my first time trying to make beef stew / and I remember the Indian stories / about thinking kind thoughts while cooking…” Here’s another example from “Names I’d Forgotten”: “I used to get drunk in the morning, starting awake / in the sinister warmth of the couch, tangled up / in my raincoat and pants like a trapped animal.”
Millar also goes beyond the self with that same biting wit, as in poems like “Heart Attack”:
You’ve always suspected the voice of defiance
would carry you only so far, wondering
when your life might end
even as you lounged on the high school steps
smoking a Lucky Strike.
In those days you considered it honorable
to make yourself drunk with fear…
As much as I like Millar’s sense of humor, though, I think what’s most pleasing about these poems is their humanity, their blend of strength and vulnerability. “Somehow I’ve told her everything,” Millar writes. “In this bed I’ve exploded every grief into her body, one by one… the drinking, the failed marriages and jobs, / the weight of my children pressing me down.”
Joseph Millar’s Overtime is one of those rare books that combines narrative brevity with lush descriptions, the result being a book that is both accessible and joyfully, smartly lyrical. This can be seen in the opening line of “Love Pirates”: “I follow with my mouth the small wing of muscle / under your shoulder, lean over your back, breathing / into your hair and thinking of nothing” Another prime example is “Ed’s Auto Repair”, one of my favorites from this book, in which the narrator watches a mechanic’s “…torch flame splash / its lizard shapes onto the dark steel.” Like all of Millar’s poems, “Ed’s Auto Repair” resonates with visceral, luxurious descriptions: a shop “smelling of gas and iron,” “air hoses [hissing] in the corners,” “the shadows under the muffler, / the new metal ticking.”
I first came across Millar’s work in various literary journals and was immediately struck by Millar’s ability to accomplish some kind of lyrical feat in every line without sounding heavy-handed. I ordered this book and have been recommending it ever since. In short, Overtime is just a lovely example of wordsmithing at its best. Pick it up; your bookshelf will thank you!
____________
Michael Meyerhofer’s third book, Damnatio Memoriae, won the Brick Road Poetry Book Contest. His previous books are Blue Collar Eulogies (Steel Toe Books) and Leaving Iowa (winner of the Liam Rector First Book Award). He has also won five chapbook prizes. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals, and can be read online at www.troublewithhammers.com.
January 4th, 2011
Michael Meyerhofer
DEDICATION
In our house, not once did we hear
someone say you’re welcome
in answer to thanks. Instead—“it’s all right,”
backhanded reminder of the sacrifice
this or that Dollar Store trinket
cost folks well below the poverty line.
This is a hard habit to break.
“Don’t worry, it’s fine” when you thank me
for helping you move furniture
or coming to your reading,
your wedding, your beloved’s funeral.
“Oh, it’s all right” to students
when they thank me for margin comments,
for letting them turn in assignments
half a semester late. “It’s all right”—
the door held open a few seconds longer
for the jock on crutches,
for the blue-eyed girl breathing
into the straw fixed to her wheelchair.
I want to thank the moon for tilting
in time to highlight the rain
spilling off a parked windshield,
my body for keeping itself free
so far from cancer, diabetes, suicide.
I want to thank my fear of death
for melting whenever a beautiful woman
bends to drink from a fountain.
I want to thank the crows for mating
on any windowsill but mine.
And their answer, rising in chorus
with each day’s rusty sunset:
It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s all right.
–from Rattle #33, Summer 2010
October 25th, 2010
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Review by Michael Meyerhofer
ZEPHYR
by Susan Browne
Steel Toe Books
Western Kentucky University
1906 College Heights Blvd. #11086
Bowling Green, KY 42101-1086
ISBN 978-0-9824169-4-5
2010, 92 pp, $12.00
www.steeltoebooks.com
The poems in Zephyr, winner of the 2009 Steel Toe Books Prize in Poetry (Editor’s Choice), by Susan Browne, reminded me right away of Bob Hicok’s work—and I mean that as the highest of compliments. Browne, like Hicok, is willing to take big risks in her poems. Unlike other established poets who begin to play it safe after awhile, Browne continuously pushes the envelope, betting the success of each poem on its next line. That makes these poems daring, authentic, and fun.
As the one-word title implies, there’s a certain directness to these poems, but it’s not the directness of Zen-like brevity; rather, it’s the directness of the snappy punch line; the elegant, quick turn of phrase; the wholly unexpected image that renders you unable to imagine a thing being described any other way. Take, for example, the everyday malaise described in “Mountain”: “Maybe a map is a good thing / On those days I feel / Like I’m riding a rhino up a mountain…”
Another fine example can be found in “Tuesday,” wherein Browne perfectly captures the combination of panic and numbness felt by someone who returns home to find her house has been broken into: “The front door’s smashed open, wood busted, / Hinges broken, a dusty space / Where the TV had been, / And what you feel is Oh. / ….Then the police arrive, their radios blaring. / Sorry, they say, but this happens every day. / Oh, you say. Just Oh, nodding, wearing all / your best jewelry at once.”
She is also a poet who knows how to use line breaks (to flush out double-meanings, to create tension, to set up a joke) in an era when many other poets struggle with basic punctuation. Take, for example, the first and last lines of “At Bloomingdale’s Grand Opening in San Francisco.” Here, the laugh-out-loud humor belies what seems to be a genuine, human struggle for identity in a postmodern world:
I can’t find my way out
of the new shopping center
which was added on to the old shopping center
and now covers two million square feet of earth.
….
I can never go outside again,
these doors only open onto other doors,
down into the funnel of more and more,
until I’m buried in denim, ten thousand different kinds of jeans,
a cross made of diamonds driven into my heart.
Further, the unexpected turn at the end is especially striking because it combines religious, commercial, and romantic imagery all at once (plus a nod to figurative vampirism); these lines simultaneously invoke a sense of tenderness and violence, humor and sadness, that could be seen as a microcosm of the entire poem (plus the entire book as a whole).
Another thing I admire about these poems is their sense of perspective. You get from Zephyr a sense that Browne is a poet who never pulls her punches; nor, though, is she a poet of glamorous self-indulgence and melodrama. Rather, she is able to strike right to the heart of an event, its deepest essence, by maintaining a multi-dimensional perspective—which is a fancy way of saying she takes poetry seriously but knows not to take herself too seriously. Take, for instance, these lines from “Sadness”: “You wanted to be happy / but got hooked on sadness. / ….Your one hope was to be the saddest person alive / and win an award,” or this opening from “To the Moment”: “Thank God you’re here, / eternal warrior who wrestles against the joyless / onslaught of mortal ugh.” We could use a lot more poems that poke fun at the need some (many?) artists have to outdo each other’s lamentations, to view their work as more pivotal than it actually is.
“Fairy Tale Elegy” (a poem reminiscent of Jeannine Hall Gailey) is another fine example: “Once upon a time in the Land of Sad, / a girl went on a journey. / She was not a princess, except to her mother… / Her father had vanished some tipsy moons ago, / kidnapped by the pirate Captain Smirnoff.” The girl goes on to find love, but reject it because “she had to return to the Land of Sad,” perhaps a roundabout acknowledgment of just how addictive depression and sadness are in the first place (especially for those of us who find themselves in this rather odd business of words).
Browne’s poems contain plenty of vulnerability, too, as in “Hard to Believe”: “We stood by our mother’s grave / in black silk sheathes…./ My younger sister couldn’t afford a dress / so had bought one at Nordstrom, / a store known to take everything back.” Here the humor, taken in contrast with the sadness of the opening, actually makes us feel a little guilty for laughing—which could itself serve as a metaphor for funerals, since everyone knows that it’s exactly when you’re supposed to be solemn that your lip starts twitching.
What I continuously return to in Browne’s poems, though, is her taut imagery, her imaginative leaps, as in her description of a dog’s fur “rippling in sunlight like black fire,”, or this ghoulishly awkward scene described in “On Our First Date”:
He ordered oxtail, heap of dark meat
he scooped with his hands off the white plate,
saying, The marrow has the best flavor…
It’s not just the imagery but the fantastic use of assonance (especially the ominous long-O sound) plus the close attention to stressed syllables that makes these opening lines especially vivid.
Equally worthy of note are Browne’s wry observations—such as in “The Nose on Your Face,” which points out that: “In all your life, you will never see your actual face. / If you close one eye, you can gaze / at the side of your nose, but that’s it.” I think we all secretly crave a good dose of wisdom from the poems we read; wisdom starts with observations, and the wryer the better. The trick, though, is finding a poet who won’t turn you off with their own sense of self-importance, their haughty overuse of language. No such concern with Browne; here, we have a smart poet who seems to genuinely care about her readers, who hopes (rather than insists) that we leave her book just a little better off than how we arrived.
____________
Michael Meyerhofer’s second book, Blue Collar Eulogies, was published by Steel Toe Books. His first, Leaving Iowa, won the Liam Rector First Book Award. He has also won the Marjorie J. Wilson Best Poem Contest, the James Wright Poetry Award, the Laureate Prize, the Annie Finch Prize for Poetry, and four chapbook prizes. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals, and can be read online at www.troublewithhammers.com.
February 5th, 2010
Review by Michael Meyerhofer
THE SELECTED POEMS OF LI PO
translated by David Hinton
Anvil Press Poetry
Neptune House
70 Royal Hill
London SE10 8RF
UK
IBSN 978-0856462917
1998, 160 pp., $16.00
http://www.anvilpresspoetry.com
The elegant genius of Li Po hardly requires further mention here. As a long-time fan of Chinese and Japanese poetry in translation, I came to this book with great excitement and admittedly high expectations. That might have been my undoing. Despite the overwhelmingly beautiful imagery inherent in these deceptively simple poems, I found myself greatly distracted by the often strangled feel of David Hinton’s translations.
This is far from Hinton’s best work, I’m afraid. To be honest, I caught myself wondering more than once if these translations were done by one of my ESL students then just sent to press without much editing. I was surprised to learn that this book won the Landon Translation Prize from the Academy of American Poets, given that a large percentage of these translations are frankly very hard on the ears! I applaud Hinton’s efforts to bring still-greater attention to the fantastic poems of Li Po; unfortunately, the translator seems to have confused economy of language with playing fast with loose with basic grammar.
Case in point, a couple lines from Hinton’s translation of “Frontier Mountain Moon”: “A hundred thousand miles long, steady/wind scouring Jasper-Gate Pass howls.” Hinton’s translation forces a rather unnatural caesura after “Pass” and the whole line feels a bit overloaded, i.e. the wind is steady, scouring, AND howling without a single comma to let us catch our breath!
Now consider this alternative: “A hundred thousand miles long, steady/wind howls, scouring Jasper-Gate Pass.” Those simple changes are much easier on the ears and sacrifice none of the poem’s imagery.
Here’s another example, this time from “At Fang-ch’eng Monastery, Discussing Ch’an with Yuan Tan-ch’iu”: “It’s like boundless dream here in this/world, nothing anywhere to trouble us…. There’s a bird among blossoms calling…” The imagery is lovely but the syntax is unnecessarily rough. Again, consider a few simple changes: “This world is like a boundless dream,/nothing anywhere to trouble us…. There’s a bird calling among blossoms…” These slight alterations preserve the imagery and feel of the poem without completely losing the music of the lines.
Sometimes, the problem isn’t Hinton’s grammar so much as his word choice. Consider “Morning up near White River origins…” (“Written While Wandering the White River in Nan-Yang, After Climbing onto the Rocks”). To be fair, I don’t speak a lick of Chinese, but I can’t imagine Li Po intended the Chinese equivalent of as vague and bland a word as “origins.”
Another example is the odd choice of the word “distances” in “On heaven’s wind, a sea traveler/wanders by boat through distances” (“Song of the Merchant”). How on earth do you wander THROUGH distances? Why not just say, “On heaven’s wind, a sea traveler/wanders distances by boat”, or even the more liberal, “On heaven’s wind, a sea traveler/wanders great distances by boat”?
The point of a translation is to express the overall image and feel of the original work, given the rules and pitfalls of a different language. In other words, obviously some latitude must be taken on the part of the translator. Often, I get the feeling that Hinton was trying to pack each line with as many verbs and adverbs as possible.
Now and then, though, he gets it right. For example, in “At Yuan Tan-ch’iu’s Mountain Home,” he goes with “…still sound asleep under a midday sun…” instead of “still under a midday sun sound asleep…” which you might have expected, given his atrocious syntax elsewhere. I also really enjoyed his translation of Li Po’s four line poem, “Gazing at Crab-Apple Mountain”:
Up early, I watched the sun rise again.
At dusk, I watched birds return to roost.A wanderer’s heart sours bitterly. And here
on Crab-Apple Mountain, it’s only worse.
In general, Hinton is at his best when Li Po is at his briefest. Another good example is “Written on a Wall at Summit-Top Temple,” also just four lines:
Staying the night at Summit-Top Temple,
you can reach out and touch the stars.I venture no more than a low whisper,
afraid I’ll wake the people of heaven.
The use of the word “venture” is a bit strange, but far from a deal-breaker, given how Hinton manages to convey quite brilliantly the simple elegance of the poem as a whole. Still, there are times when the hiccups are just too hard to ignore.
Case in point: the final lines of “After Climbing Pa-ling Mountain, in the West Hall at K’al’yuan Monastery: Offered to a Monk Beyond this World on Heng Mountain”: “…I feed on kind winds,/ new blossoms teaching mind this vast.” I want to be clear on this: there’s a period after “vast.” Now, I don’t want to sound picky because I know that “vast” can technically be used as a noun, but aside from John Milton, you’d be very hard-pressed to find anyone who uses it as anything but an adjective. In other words, it’s unnecessarily and unproductively unusual, since I doubt Li Po had Milton in mind when he wrote it. A better word would be “vastness,” maybe “emptiness” or even “void” in the Zen sense. Also, “mind” requires “my” before it, since the poem is clearly referring to the narrator’s mind, not minds in general. I’m all for stylistic play with language, but this isn’t the place for it. This is Li Po, not e.e. cummings.
Overall, as much as I was irked by some of these translations, I still found merit in the book as a whole. As always, I applaud David Hinton for his work and influence. I just get the sense that these translations would be vastly improved with a little more time, a bit more polish, and maybe a bit more liberty on the part of the translator.
____________
Michael Meyerhofer’s second book, Blue Collar Eulogies, was published by Steel Toe Books. His first, Leaving Iowa, won the Liam Rector First Book Award. He has also won the James Wright Poetry Award, the Marjorie J. Wilson Best Poem Contest, the Laureate Prize, and the Annie Finch Prize for Poetry. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals, and can be read online at www.troublewithhammers.com.
