The Low Pouring Stars George J. Farrah

The Low Pouring Stars 
Farrah, Geroge J.

  Review byAlice Weiss

In Geroge J. Farrah’s Low Pouring Stars, the speaker is searching for an autobiography. This is the title of the last poem in the book, but it is also the underlying theme. What is fascinating about the poet’s process of search is that the speaker couples, not only surprising images or similes, but predicates, as for example in “Daybreak,”

something

grows heavy

& light

as beauty

needs

a

distance to survive

The book proceeds by undermining proposition with image, abstract with uncoupled concrete, thus in “Ash,” where the conceit of the poem leans on the drift of ash in the air to portray attachment, a lovely contradiction, the speaker begins,

Born to the baths

we need of course. . .

. . .I am omnipresent. . .

withholding humiliation

from community ears . . .

a smooth girl consumed with guilt

the behemoth of sand

the sweet corner of her lip

the volumes of night written again and again

in her

It should be obvious from the quoted sections that however philosophical the poet’s aim, he counters the heaviness of it by writing in forms that emphasizing space and stops. Lists of things in and out of sentences move across the page in a kind of lace. In a “Disregard for your False Anatomy” (certainly the best title in the book) “Crayons of eternity’s misses” the speaker identifies as his favorites and that coupling culminates in “tins of handwriting/ that accumulate daily/ rare clothing.” Or in “Eyelatch,” his “artificial right eye/ where the debris of infinity/ has lodged/. . .

we will not crumble

(forever) in the corner

without a room

a body . . .

breathing

in all

of your seasons

at once

as

we take in

so much of the world

through our hands

Another, longer poem, “Out of the Window,” seems like an elegy for the loss of self, “a palm of a voice sweats/’this is where I saw the day/ defeat our voices crying.’ In “The Edge of a Reservoir,” a woman speaks to him

I am a fire pet

she said. . .

. . .

a relentlessness like

the leaves

the grass is

now

the whole world. . .

. . .

I think maybe

you’re a contribution

of pouring stars

down my shirt

he says

but the year wanders, they wander.

The airiness, indeed the quality of being philosophical in the phrase, “but the year wanders”

even of cliché, is stabilized and an reinvigorated by the next and final, “they wander,” ambiguously pointing to years, and also to the couple, under the stars pouring down his shirt

like a spilled cup of coffee. I love the exactness of that image and the seductiveness of the

address to his ‘fire pet.’ And the way the poet seems to be able to couple delight and mourning.

The book is aptly titled The Low Pouring Stars for the flow of images, form and their play with statement and abstraction, distances and stops.