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Title: Love Song with Motor Vehicles (American Poets Continuum) by Alan Michael Parker ISBN: 1-929918-35-6 Publisher: "BOA Editions, Ltd." Pub. Date: 10 May, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.6 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: an exemplar of sound and sense
Comment: This impressive collection will appeal to anyone with the patience to learn to respect what language can do. Parker's poems reward the reader who needs and wants a poem to be more than a banal reflection of life's tedium. At the level of the infinitesimal and universal, these poems bespeak an unmatched sense of poetry's aural and philosophical possibility.
_Love Song with Motor Vehicles_ builds upon Parker's densely and deftly crafted _Days Like Prose_ and the esoteric play of _The Vandals_ to offer verse that achieves the miracle of writing synchronously the infinite and the moment. Parker's poems extend far beyond their time; they echo past traditions (Eliot's "Prufrock" haunts the collection, as the title makes apparent) while they figure as a testament that contemporary poetry (this collection, at least) can balance an attentive poetic craft with an imaginative wit. These poems do not shy from grappling with pain, alienation, and grief; yet they instill a faith that remains long after the poem has finished: here, god literally is in the details (and the draperies, the bath, the broom, the vase), and Parker writes such intricacy with elegance.
Both unflinching and benevolent, these poems heighten our intelligence, embolden our hearts, and sustain our poetic, if not worldly, faith. Moreover, _Love Song with Motor Vehicles_ proffers the inextricability of intellect, love, poetry, and faith--a synthesis we could all do well to cherish, if not hope to express. Parker achieves such expression beautifully.
Rating: 5
Summary: Good Stuff
Comment: A very strong collection. There are enough poems here that have immediate, powerful impact to teach me patience for those which demand more of my intelligence. Parker's language is also consistently surprising and energetic, tight and musical: the lines are studded with sound events . . . unexpected assonance and slant rhyme. I love how the surface music (the surface play) creates a tug against the deeper emotion in these poems. They manage to be both slick and playful, and deeply felt, too.
There are a number of particularly American portraits here; these are especially good. I'll likely photocopy them for my classes: "Paradise"; "The Piano"; "Librarian's Song"; "Books and Money"; "The Sybil." They strike me as coming near the heart of the book, an American love song to people recognizable from our country, our moment. There's almost something Whitmanian about it . . . except that it's 2003, so there's an ironic edge, a recognizable sharpness to the scenes . . . .
I also admire the stance of this book. How can a book be so far from sentimentality when the speaker tells us over and over again that he loves us? His onliest affection . . . . No small achievement. It's good stuff; it could make you a more careful reader.
Rating: 5
Summary: This One Asks the Big Questions
Comment: For this reader, Parker's new book turns a significant corner in a poetic career. His debut volume (Days Like Prose, '97) marked his as a sharply distinctive new voice. The second collection was freshly formalist, deceptively fun, and a great read; five years later I still think it's no less than brilliant (The Vandals, '99). That book's success was a potential problem for Parker's third volume, in the hard-act-to-follow department. But with Love Song, Parker has become the kind of poet I'll continue to read from volume to volume, because his lifetime work will repay that investment. These poems follow The Vandals in every right sense, including leaving them behind, all but the echoes. Now what was there from the start really comes clear for me - though his voice and his sensibility are postmodern, Parker is an elegiac poet whose vocation is representing mutability, very much in the 17th century metaphysical sense. His speakers are smitten with the sentient world (in which they include enlivened objects), identifying with as many doors and vases as with people, and they're always finding unlooked-for qualities to be curious about, and then to love. Equally balanced between celebration and dirge, often in the same poem, he is maturing into a poet interested in the big questions, asked in small ways: how to live intensely with the knowledge of mortality, how to "delight in our daily dying," and then how to "go to the door/ and step out, and be gone." (These lines come from the first and last poems in the volume.) As time goes on, I read only the poets who ask such stuff of their art.
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Title: Big Back Yard (A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America) by Michael Teig ISBN: 1929918372 Publisher: "BOA Editions, Ltd." Pub. Date: 15 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Ha-Ha: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets) by David Kirby ISBN: 0807128945 Publisher: Louisiana State University Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Columbarium (Phoenix Poets) by Susan Stewart ISBN: 0226774430 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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Title: Insomnia Diary (Pitt Poetry Series) by Bob Hicok ISBN: 0822958422 Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Clerk's Tale : Poems by Spencer Reece ISBN: 0618422544 Publisher: Mariner Books Pub. Date: 04 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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