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| Eric Linsker |
La Far
Eric Linsker
Copyright © 2014
by Eric Linsker
The Iowa Poetry
prize
University of
Iowa Press
Iowa City, Iowa
95 pages, $19,
softbound
Review by Zvi A.
Sesling
“Linsker’s poems
splice and complicate realms and modes and sensory domains with
wit and acute
musical edgework. They are deeply, quixotically enjoined in the hard and
essential ‘grief
of eternal joy.’” –Emily Wilson, judge, 2013 Iowa Poetry Prize.
Do blurbs and the
poetry they are about have to be inexplicably obtuse? Perhaps in Iowa, out among the cornfields it
is the thing during long sessions of boredom watching corn grow or a long
winter of dealing with snow blowing across buried fields.
So many good
accessible poets and this book by a poet who, “holds degrees from Harvard and
Iowa Writers’ Workshop” is picked, perhaps because of the degrees
or perhaps for
its incoherence.
Now perhaps
readers of this review have a better take on what the author is saying
than I do, but
let’s look a “Love Streams.”
He was choosing
colors, sounds
Of clouds, that
year he was
Troubled with his
room,
Through what
philosophers
Of clouds, that
year he was
Housed and
thunderous, wet
Through. What
philosophers
He read, he hid
Housed, and
thunderous, wet
Windows,
differently pulled,
He read he hid
By time, a glass
hand. Through
Windows
differently pulled
The rain like
school to where
By time, a glass
hand through
His hair brushed
back
The rain. Like
school to where
Sits a desk, the
chair that had been
His hair
brushed. Back
At the window now
a clearing
And so on and on
this poem continues, three pages worth of tedium, like watching corn grow or
snow in mid January blow across an empty Iowa field.
I would apply the
same to the “Land of Reasoning” which begins with more forgettable lines:
In the clutches
of song the survivors
Enter the earth
no longer looking
For those they
have lost that was
Another time even
the underworld changes
Quite frankly I
did not find this a redeeming volume of poetry despite winning The Iowa Poetry
Prize and who needs to say that just because it won the prize that it is a
prize winner? Does this book truly represent great talent or
rather who one knows?
So here are some
opening lines with titles in parentheses and with which I present my case:
What else would
we want if we were
good am I
here (The Unities)
In the verdure of
the word smoke
A manhole opened
outside her
None in her
family read (In the Raid Instances)
red trillium
It starts to snow
shut. (A Place Where Everything is
Visible)
All I know is
that when I sit down to read a book of poetry I seek the accessible, the
sensible, the enjoyable, the book I want to remember. I did not find any of these here,
though for many
of you it may be the opposite experience. I hope it is.
___________________________________________________
Zvi A. Sesling
Author, King of the Jungle and Across Stones of Bad Dreams
Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review
Publisher, Muddy
River Books
Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 7 & Anthology 8
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