I finally got down to a long sit with Days into Flatspin which is the title of that first attracted me when Marcus read a piece from it at Poetic Desserts how long ago?
It has a different tone than the work I read a month ago. Much denser, in a good way. More reporting less moralist.
His take on personification of the 7-11 changing commerce over decades has judgement in it, but crotchetyness and humor. He plays a lot with personification, of turtles and mother nature herself. It is more towards a sort of refinement for entertainment in places but within poem and from poem to poem the tone (from serious to intense to calm and to comic), pace, distance from reader and subject as well as style of linearness: asides and enjambments keeps shifting so it never becomes predictable.
What repeats is a pivot of hinge from idea to idea turning. The word hinge itself repeats 5 times as a favorite concept running as a thread through the pieces. But the balance between expected and not is what rings. Pairing of comparisons are as usual as minnows as sperm but the ovum a floating bread crust tweaks things bright. It’s a continual sort of ping of ideas.
Even a verb choice makes a sharpness that isn’t expected and acts as a clapper to switch alert. In The Off Chance “We’ve watched/ you captain the tail//of a housecat, saying the compulsion to move/to displace even a fraction/ of the sea of what it is” he gets to the end of the unity underlying and tying all things through an unusual route that isn’t solely a list but the soundscape that resonates with the meaning.
Right from the book’s beginning and the hull of her ribs, anvil head (of cow and her comical and accurately described badly tuned tuba) and ants worried to the punky/ tops of knotted fence posts, there’s an intensity of sensory attention to detail and a freshness that fits the newborn carried through the pasture “a drooling lump/of living in the verdant riddle” .I love the pov of him feeling outside the moment yet he’s the only one who will retain it with cow and infant not being able to remember ever having met or been surprised by each other or observing each other. There’s an accuracy of capture there. As there is in a different way in Morning with the sentiment “If anything like mercy had the controls/the sun would switch off. Shakes/ in the marrow in the bodhran heart. I’m//done.”
