La Far Eric Linsker

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