Green Sees Things in Waves: Poems Book

Green Sees Things in Waves signals a great leap forward for August Kleinzahler. He has always been a fine musician. Here, however, he goes beyond the image-based poem, and renders a fluid consciousness in a manner that is at once precise and expansive. The most striking formal quality is the syntax. On a smaller scale, it enables the poet to pull off some wonderful, almost hieratic touches: note how he ascribes "that narrow russet instrument of face" to his subject in "Vulture Under the Palisades." On a larger scale, his syntactical play allows Kleinzahler to pepper his poetry with pop culture, Americana, the everyday, and his touching and intimate observations of people. All of these qualities are expertly packed into this sinuous sentence from the memorable "Snow in North Jersey": It is with a terrible deliberateness that Mr. Ruiz reaches into his back pocket and counts out $18 and change for his LOTTO picks while in the upstairs of a thousand duplexes with the TV on, cancers tick tick tick and the snow continues to fall and blanket these crowded rows of frame and brick with their heartbreaking porches and castellations and the red '68 Impala on blocks and Joe he's drinking again and Myrna's boy Tommy in the old days it would have been a disgrace and Father Keenan's not been having a good winter and it was nice enough this morning till noon anyhow with the sun sitting up there like a crown over a great big dome of mackerel sky. Here as elsewhere, the poet constantly shifts focus, both visually and in terms of diction. Yet even as reality and dream "mingle and dissipate," Kleinzahler always affirms the ultimate reality of the imagination. --Mark RudmanRead More