ON CIVILITY

Curtin calls the world’s injustices into question with this collection of poems.

Has the world gone mad? It sometimes seems that way. “Is justice blind… / or just incredibly / near sighted?” asks the speaker in “On Justice.” In “On the Big Questions of Civilization,” he wonders, “When did we as humans begin to believe / that some other humans are disposable?” Across 24 poems, Curtin holds up such concepts for a closer look, spinning them around or upside down to reveal their irrationality, absurdity, or utter brokenness. The poems all take their topics as their titles, from the broad (“On Faith,” “On Forgiveness,” “On Ignorance,” “On Justice”) to the particular (“On Precision Guesswork,” “On the Beauty of Omaha Beach”) to the ungrammatical (“On Overcoming Challenge Is a Privilege, “On We Are All Dying”). “Since / no one is guaranteed five minutes / into the future,” he ponders in that last one, “the question becomes /what will we do with the next five / minutes or with luck, the five / minutes beyond that?” As the subtitle suggests, these pieces are meant to provoke reflection rather than to provide answers. While some of them do this, more often they feel akin to slightly self-righteous tweets. The lines often read like (not especially poetic) prose broken into verses, as in “On Confusing Justice and Revenge”: “Revenge is / a reaction to a base emotion and always / negative in its use. It is intended to / get even, to medicate the emotional / need, to retake control.” The insights are disappointingly trite (the author offers variations of the line “forgiveness is a gift you give yourself” in two separate poems).The best poem in the collection is the brief “On the Empty Glass,” because it features an unexpected turn: “After we fill our glass / with thoughts and prayers. // We still have an empty / glass.” Readers will likely find themselves in agreement with Curtin much of the time—perhaps even all of the time—but sincere humanistic statements on their own do not generally make for compelling poetry.

A well-meaning but unartful collection of poems.