From time to time, I post reviews of books by authors whose work has appeared at The Song Is... Tonight I'd like to post Susan Moorhead's review of Gary Glauber's new book.
Review by Susan Moorhead: Rocky Landscape with Vagrants
Gary Glauber's latest book of poetry, Rocky Landscape with Vagrants, opens with a surreal poem where a line provides a most accurate description of a poet's work - "...my own exasperation translates my speech into bird calls." His book, divided into four individual sections that together provide a cumulative whole, grapples with the theatre of the absurd otherwise known as our current political landscape, "where were you when history came unglued?". From the point of view as one who has seen earlier times of unrest and conflict, in Back to the Garden fifty years on, we read how protests promised changes that went missing under the crush of violence and loss, "rendering a rift unlike any before, an ideological shift, a dream shattered into voices that no longer knew harmony."
Exploring the strange exercise of aging, some poems consider the past with a knowing sadness, remembering when "everything was a contest. It seemed to matter so much." and yet punching back with "It is our purpose to resist the force". We meet a mentor from an academic past who loved to teach but was ground down and spent over time, discover the moment the poet chose his path: "a silent self's promise to keep at the simple and complex process of transforming thought and feeling..." and the responsibility of poems to find truth as means of surviving the world. How merely searching out the color blue can "soothe our savagery", or, as he encounters another poet's missteps with dismay, notes how her words were "full of wrong notes that strove for the universal".
Poems here walk the closed streets of night careening into sideshows of memories of lovers, real and imagined, and lean into nostalgia with poems that read like stories or short films. A boy becoming invisible to his family as they talk in Hungarian in other rooms, a tapestry of a town where "When she grabs knife to peel supper potatoes, she might well be arming herself against violent world.". The measuring out of life in clock ticks, in the ticking of his father's heart valve, in the beautiful poem, Accessorizing, a moving tribute. A personal favorite, the imagery and wit of Song of the Whale Shark, as an enormous whale shark cruises the scene, misunderstood, "endangered but not necessarily endearing." (kind of like poetry, yes?)
Music, art, pop culture thread the sentences as distractions that both delight and obscure the troubles of the workaday life, an argument that the aging spirit wears a suit of weariness faced with the obvious difficulties of living, but still the poet notes "where beauty hides unrecognized, given no proper framework in which to thrive, no comprehension that a little tenderness might someday save us all." . Yes, despite acknowledging the teeter totter balancing act of remembrance, both sweet and bitter, and a gruff assessment of present day despairs, the poet "will sing harmony in the kaleidoscopic third", finding that proper framework we need to thrive in the very lines of his poetry. Bird calls indeed, these necessary songs.
Susan Moorhead is a poet and writer, with a chapbook, The Night Ghost, and a poetry book forthcoming in January.
To read Gary's poems that have appeared at this blog-zine, please follow the links below:
http://thesongis.blogspot.com/2018/08/welcome-to-gary-glauber.html
http://thesongis.blogspot.com/2019/01/five-by-gary-glauber.html
Let's listen to some music tonight as well. Since Sonny Rollins' birthday is tomorrow, I'll post links to a few of his videos, starting with "St. Thomas": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA2XIWZxMKM
"Blue 7" is also from Saxophone Colossus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv31fjnUVcE&list=PLf9eDaFgj2Gg25tR1i3cT2S3-V3B53VgD
Here is a live version of "Sonnymoon for Two (Evening)": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl4LKaS1nLI
I'll finish with his "Without a Song" from the 9/11 Concert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwFOFKpPPLA
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