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| Eric Greinke |
Review of Eric Greinke’s Invisible Wings, Pressa Press, 2019
Eric Greinke is a
poet with a moderate pallet and a subtle intelligence. His poems
notice things, ordinary things, and pursue them; he is curious but he
treads lightly and could easily be disregarded because of his
plain-spoken disguise. He is worth slowing down for. In his latest
collection of 44 short poems, Invisible Wings, every sound and
cadence rings true, if the reader listens carefully. He writes of a
“nympho wind” that sings songs “into our rainy brains.” This
is a “kissing” wind that arouses someone, whose breath goes wild
and cries out “like a poem / just before birth.”
The first poem in
the collection is “Wings,” where Grienke flirts with the
cosmos whose stars were named after “ancient Gods” and whose
direction spreads like an (imagined) expanding universe. Its energy
is not showy or boastful, and Greinke delivers in a style of language
that one could call, without error, plain. Yet, much of the
ordinariness in the footsteps of the lines causes a likely
embarrassment for one who suddenly realizes that the poem she’s
reading has got quite out of hand. “Our collective neurons,” the
poet writes, “back beyond the big bang,” have reverberated to
become
an
infinitesimal compact
of
impacted selves,
their
endings encoded in
expanding
beams of energy.
To recognize the power of the Greinke’s
language, his eschewing of sensation, his insistence on exactitude,
is to grope about, “blind in every dimension / but our poor human
senses.” But arise! We must scramble to keep up with the fusions,
dimensions, disasters, collisions, with each “atom alone but
connected.“ Really, you have to run to keep up with what’s going
down in this poem, until it “plays on all the pages & stages of
our days.” He doesn’t need to mention WS.
Now that we see that nothing at all is
ordinary about the poem, it’s basically over. The story, that is.
But not without transformation. The entire process, the cause and
effect, the eons of time, and the vast universe itself are
cast.
. . into the frozen fire,
transformed
again into invisible wings.
Still, when an opening poem is a tour
de force, one may reasonably expect to find some wobbles or
potholes up ahead. And Greinke has included a few poems here that may
have benefitted from a rest. “The Sunken Dream,” for instance,
can be flatfooted in places, or may not know what it is really trying
to convey. We get the gist; but perhaps a pivotal image and some
liquid language could dive into the deep of a flooded valley of
drowned houses. When the speaker says, “He blamed the government,
but / his thoughts were persistent,“ we can admire the savvy
line-break, but that is not enough to rescue “The Sunken Dream.”
There are other winners, of course. One
of those others is “November Nights,” the most sensuous of the
lot. It doesn’t strive; it begins gently:
I
find your face
on
a pillow of leaves,
lately
adrift.
One knows that the speaker must go down
to the pillow, that the leaves “lately adrift” are gathered
meaningfully in one place now, a place for love and rest and
listening. Greinke is a listener.
****Marcia Ross, author of the novel Layla and the Lake (Pelekinesis, 2019)
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