Some poets like Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, or Emily Dickinson can write about everyday life and somehow elevate it with their peculiar assembly of details into poetry that dares to look universal themes like love and death squarely in the eye and create beauty. And then there are poets like Rodney Jones who namecheck trivial events, politicians, and celebs like David Letterman in his slice of life pie poetry. He does have some good lines here and there like "The good humor of a dying man is worth something" or :
"Newborns, maybe the first week, tell the truth.
After that it descends to propaganda."
But that's just it. Jones is good in tiny little spurts but mediocre in entire poems. One of the poems I liked the most was a longer one entitled "The Previous Tenants" in which Jones comes to know what the previous owners of his new house were like by the things they left behind. But really, this isn't a new concept or approach to memory or nostalgia. To me, I felt like, yes, this was a book of poems that I sorta enjoyed. But after finishing it, I knew that there were no words or images that were going to stay me with like when I read Ozymandias by Shelley so long ago. These are passing poems, poems written in water, as Keats might say. In a hundred years very few of these poems will be around (I would say ZERO) or make any sense to a future contemporary reader. I guess maybe this book should be subtitled "A book of unremarkable poems".
My Grade: B-
Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Print: $22.00
Ebook: $12.10
No comments:
Post a Comment