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.
The Sentence
The times were against you,
the times and all these books
telling those who didn't fit
what they should do.
You searched for words, feeling
words somehow had the power to
save you
and fog shrouded your
stanzas,
the abyss of blank pages showing through black ink.
There were more people on earth
than in the whole history of man.
Phones whispered in your ear
to reach out
and touch, to listen so you could hear a pin drop.
You were told loneliness was not a
problem
and the country was filled with
stores where
every kind of relationship was sold.
When you got there, though
the stores were empty.
You couldn't quicken enough
the formation of your friends, so
for a while
you waited, watching guru Tai
rollerblade as he promised eternal
bliss
and you kept praying, and still
you couldn't move people in and
out of your life
in rhythm with changing times.
They handed you the individualist
rope
just enough of it, they thought,
to hang yourself, thinking that in
a world
where everything was available
nothing was truly prized
and those who stood alone, stood
galaxies away from their dreams.
You became exhausted, dragging
your tundra wherever you went.
So you took a pistol and fired,
hoping to kill
Winter that wouldn't leave your
head,
hoping for a hot star to blossom on your temple.
You were never concerned with the
rise
and fall of philosophies echoing
the stock market peaks and valleys
so your wound opened, a large O
and your body, for a moment
uncoiled,
a tall exclamation mark
at the end of a harsh sentence,
telling it, O yes, telling it like it really was!
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