A Good Read
Poem reviewer, Dr. Sally Buckner
Dr. Sally Buckner has authored two poetry collections, Strawberry Harvest and Collateral
Damage, and edited two anthologies, including Word and Witness: 100 Years of North Carolina Poetry. After a long teaching career, she is
now Professor Emeritus at Peace College in Raleigh,
NC.
Review
This It’s good news indeed that Andre de
Korvin’s third poetry collection will be published this year. As in his earlier collections—The Four Hard Edges of War and Dreaming Indigo Time—his newer
work illustrates what Peter Farb said in his seminal study, Word Play: “[ the
poet’s] skill is to find new possibilities in the resources already
in the language.”
A One-Winged
Angel plumbs those
resources as deeply and thoroughly as any poems I can recall. Time and time again, de Korvin
demonstrates Farb’s description of the function of poetry: “to depict the world with a fresh
perception . . . so that we will listen to language once again.” Sometimes this is achieved through
metaphor as in “Breakdown”:
“your phone swinging off its hook,/ a metronome saying no to
harmony”; or in “Guilt”:”Those long processions of
days/ all dressed up in dark, awkward/ like employees of a funeral home/ on
their way to the burial of some wealthy client,/ all of a sudden realizing/
they had lost their way.”
Even more frequently de Korvin energizes our attention with
surprising twists.
“Guilt” begins, “Traveling from village to city/
and city to village,/we sought other jails. . . . We ignored prisons that were not/
highly spoken of../We knew there was no need to go through/ the formal
procedure of an arrest../ We could just walk in from the cold/ and exercise our right to be judged.”
We sought other
jails? Our right to be judged?
These terms confound our expectations, yet in a poem exploring how
we are sometimes obsessed with guilt, the lines ring with
authenticity. Later, when the judge
hands down his “strictest of sentences,” de Korvin says,
“We were all shook up,” and the echo of Elvis, singing of
romantic passion in the midst of this solemn analysis of one of our darker
moods jolts us—but not unpleasantly.
“The Sentence” has a nightmarish quality that
reminds us of Kafka’s short story, “The Trial.” The accused protagonist is seeking for
some kind of salvation: in language
(but “fog shrouded your stanzas”), in relationships (but
“you couldn't move people in and out of your life in rhythm with
changing times.”). I
won’t reveal the stunning ending except to say that suddenly the poet
uses sentence in a different
sense.
A character from Guy Owen’s novel, The Ballad of the
Flim-Flam Man, often says, “He enlarged my life. A fact.” I’ll be surprised if you
don’t find that A One-Winged
Angel enlarges your life.
Access the poems with the links provided below:
Guilt
Breakdown
The Sentence
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