"For All These Wretched, Beautiful & Insignificant Things So Uselessly & Carelessly Destroyed." (Poems) by Hosho McCreesh

"For All These Wretched, Beautiful

& Insignificant Things So Uselessly

& Carelessly Destroyed." (Poems) by Hosho McCreesh

ISBN: 978-1-934513-09-5

Sunnyoutside Press

P.O. Box 911

Buffalo, NY 14207

USA

www.sunnyoutside.com

Hosho McCreesh © 2008



Review by Mike Amado



If Morrissey, back in the days of his former band The Smiths,

were to inspire poets to explore the beauty of long titles, and

then grade them, "For All These. . ." by Hosho McCreesh

would receive an A-plus. But McCreesh ups the volume with

these terse, yet full and rich verses of "For All These Wretched,

Beautiful& Insignificant Things So Uselessly & Carelessly Destroyed."

It great to have a title that's a part of and is one with the poem.

It's refreshing to read a collection that has a long title itself,

(as opposed to having a title consisting of only one word,

which is a current thing to do). These first line-ish / titles provide an

expansive foyer to a familiar structure.



The poem:

"What We Want Is a Nice Bottle,

A Little Music & Some Humble Place

To Host Little Celebrations of Living -

...maybe a decent potato soup &

a few bucks left over

after covering our nut.

But there's nothing for it,

not in this kind of world . . ."



Embedded within the images and simpleness of the everyday is

a longing and a search to reclaim, remember and birthe these

celebrations and beauties once again. A sort of repairing of that

which was dismantled. These are words of loss, sadness and

resiliency.





In the same vein, "Full Moon, Half Sun . . ." dwells with a

desolation:

"Long Shadows Draped

Over Dusty Backroads -

A Train Whistle Cries Out

Across the Rio Grande Valley -

& life,

thus far:

a search

for some place

that cannot be

taken

away.



Poet, artist and prose writer Hosho McCreesh was first introduced to

the word through music. And a music gently flows in the voice of this

chapbook, singing standards of a new age.

On the covers and festooning the inside pages of "For All These. . ."

are the illustrations of Kevin Charles Kline. Basic drawings of skeletons,

body parts and all sorts of anatomy scatted about so "Carelessly",

driving home the books premise.





McCreesh performs some dismantling of his own in the poem "It Was Paris . . ."

Leveling Paris' legendary assumptions into ordinary truths, that, Paris is

after all like "anywhere" and "everywhere" else.

Describing the fabled city as, "Vibrating With some Kind of Romantic,

Sad Song . . .", the speaker desperately walking the streets,

"Lonely as a weeping trumpet," only to find at that moment,

"a flash of angry movement" - an empty dog food can thrown in the Seine.

"Suddenly the day went cold,

went painfully, typically

unromantic."





McCreesh also pays a lament to Vincent Van Gogh in

"This Dizzying, Senseless Place . . ." asking:

what if his beloved would have, "just/ taken/ the/ ear"

and accepted it as:

"a gesture, an offering,

a talisman of something

deep & honest & true."



"For All These . . ." takes the reader from Paris to the American

south west and down to the lonely depths of the human condition.

A world where " . . . we ask too much of life.", and rue how even

the insignificant can be taken for granted and lost even to itself.



*Mike Amado is a reviewer for the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

and the author of "stunted Inner Child Shot the TV" ( Cervena Barva Press).