A compelling set of poems that would benefit from less rigid experimentation.
A shape-shifting debut poetry collection by Pavlakis.
This book opens by asking fallen soldiers to “Come up, boys. / Come up from your moldy graves.” From there, readers begin to ride the fast current of the author’s poetry. Alternating between traditional verse, heaped lines, and poetic structures that recall those in the famous avant-garde poetry magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the author’s poems have a dynamism that’s similar to that of poet Ron Silliman’s The New Sentence. But although the poems propel readers forward, they never really arrive at a destination. The text is riddled with too many clichés—so many that it feels intentional—such as “Now is the ever-present / that is never done. / Now is a piece of always” or “Is a lifetime just that—a life of time?” Although the platitudes run freely, readers will continue on, ambling toward nowhere—deeper into the mind of the speaker, who never shines through the force of his poesis. Indeed, poesis is lacking here—particularly one that would use these formal experimentations to create something other than what contemporary conceptual poetry has already given us. For instance, “Know What I Mean?” emulates Stéphane Mallarmé’s A Throw of the Dice without using any of the white space of the opposite page as a canvas, and in “Wholeness,” the line breaks are just as jarring as they would be in a Robert Creeley poem but never quite slap like a contemporary reader may expect them to do. In another instance, Pavlakis shows a compelling interest in narratological concerns: “the poet walks his unshaped thoughts / down dim, deserted idea drive / turns right on word avenue / passes weedy vacant lots / comes stunned / to dead end.” Thus the author puts a Joycean Leopold Bloom before the reader, moving on to a different linguistic field, but he never does anything with it. Readers are left hanging, waiting for some bold, loud, and syntactically irreverent linguistic matter to arrive. Overall, the poet has done an intriguing job of juxtaposing various forms of contemporary poetry, but he never allows himself to go the extra mile.
A compelling set of poems that would benefit from less rigid experimentation.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4809-8809-5
Page Count: 106
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An odd, nostalgic compilation, but a few poems about hospital patients see keenly into the condition of the individual body...
Wandzilak’s debut poetry collection spans a lifetime, musing on place, change, and mortality in light, occasional verse.
Built in the 1950s, the real-life East Deck Motel in Montauk, New York, was a mecca for beachgoers, surfers, and tourists of all stripes. But in 2015, its future was uncertain. In a sense, some of these poems, set at the motel, read as elegies—nostalgic celebrations of the seashore’s many moods. The title poem’s speaker reminisces about a night of love in the dunes, away from the crowd, and it’s gloomy with foreboding: “I could barely tell land from sea / I knew where I was, but not exactly.” With the lover’s “cold hand” in his, the speaker glimpses “the heart of a tear.” Other poems cast an eye over cultural high points, as in the longish poem “A Partial Autobiography.” The short, free-verse lines begin with oddity (“I was born with a remnant third nipple / I did not know what that meant for me”) but smooth out to more familiar touchstones: “I saw Yul Brynner play The King and I…. // I have seen the unicorns at the Cloisters //….I caught a wahoo in Turks and Caicos.” The oddity gathers and increases, however, in another cultural-event poem, this time on the occasion of seeing famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma in concert in 2013. The lilting cadence of “I ate elk with a runcible spoon!” proceeds to a playful but peculiar after-concert meal: “Later we fed Mr. Ma toasted farro / As he proceeded to eat my bone marrow!” Whimsy is one thing, but word-pairing for the sake of rhyme is another, as in this quatrain: “I have delivered fourteen lives / Each followed by fourteen placentas / Therein, I found elation upon this earth, / Unequaled to a dinner of lobster polenta.” The poet’s background as a surgeon also appears with a poetic nod to delivering bad news; in it, the narrator glances daily into a nearby cemetery, where a patient will soon be buried. A compilation of similarly medical-themed poems would be truly select.
An odd, nostalgic compilation, but a few poems about hospital patients see keenly into the condition of the individual body and soul.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5144-6727-5
Page Count: 54
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ambitious collection—which asks the world to stop its destructive ways and recognize the importance of Africans—that...
A narrator rails against racism and ignorance in this debut poetry volume.
Celly’s book contains hundreds of poems, most of them quite short, that describe a man who is living in a universe full of unenlightened individuals who cause destruction because of their lack of knowledge. In particular, they do not appreciate the contributions of people of African descent and confound the narrator with their bigotry, murderous ways, and inability to become edified. Nevertheless, he is self-assured and encourages others to follow him. “I am the maestro without the orchestra,” he writes in the volume’s opening poem, “A Maestro,” but notes that humans won’t have the privilege of discerning what’s in his mind “until they stop killing each other.” As the many poems in the volume progress, he begins to refer to himself as “The Negus,” an African emperor or king. He has the “noble blood of the Kongo Kingdom” in “Legendary Blood,” descended from warriors, geniuses, and visionaries. The tone of the poems overall seeks to be high-minded, with references to The Prince by Machiavelli and the French Revolution. There is also a call to emulate African rhythms, such as the Congolese rumba or the songs of Bob Marley, in “It Must Rhyme and Flow.” A mysterious “they” is often mentioned, though it is unclear if this is a reference to Western society, racists, or uneducated people. Yet the narrator, who has a commanding presence, does describe an overall war on Africa and encourages Africans to rise up. Moreover, he transcends race and the color barrier and desires something mystical. “I am not a Negro. I am renegade. I am the Negus straight from heaven,” he writes in “Defined by Color Only Not So Fast!” Celly’s expansive volume, which aspires to thoughtful and strong lines about humanity and its failings, is not hostile but uses grandiose language to ponder and decree. While there are hundreds of poems, many are quite vague and are just one line or a short paragraph. The work is not entirely an exercise in self-aggrandizement, but the collection’s message can get lost amid the numerous ambiguities and repeated proclamations.
An ambitious collection—which asks the world to stop its destructive ways and recognize the importance of Africans—that remains hampered by nebulous and unspecified pronouncements.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68319-824-6
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Tate Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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