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Thursday, September 25, 2014
Plots We Can’t Keep Up With Poems by Randy Phillis
Plots We Can’t Keep Up With
Poems by Randy
Phillis
Copyright 2014 by
Randy Phillis
Encircle
Publications, LLC
Softbound, 30
pages, no price given
ISBN 13: 978-1-893035-22-5
Review by Zvi A. Sesling
Every so often a
book of poetry comes across the desk by an author I have not heard of while the
blurbs on the back cover do not really reveal much though the blurb writers
seem to agree on memory, time and the bridge between past and present.
For these reasons
I opened Randy Phillis’s Plots We Can’t Keep
Up With somewhat hesitantly not wishing to be bored or stretched to my
imaginative limits. But I opened to page
1 and off I was on an interesting journey.
The opening poem is a bittersweet remembrance of a boy and his not so
cool father, yet the memory affects his life with women in barrooms.
What’s a Boy to
Do
As a kid I had a
choice:
stay in the car
or follow him in
to Ben’s, red
lights
and thick smoke,
sit at the bar
that came to my
chin or
a booth if I had
crayons and paper.
Behind the bar,
the big mirror
floated the backs
of bottle
over my forehead
as Dad
leaned forward,
elbow propped so
his cigarette
hung above his
head, studying
the barmaid’s
face not two inches
from his. Then
he’d sit far back
and laugh,
stretching carefully to ash,
and ask what went
best
with pickled
eggs. All that was good
with beer he
already knew.
Sometimes I’d
stay in the car,
play the radio
and dance
my fingers across
the dash, clench
the hard cool
wheel and jerk
until I
understood he wouldn’t be right back.
Then I wandered
the muddy lot,
floated bottle
caps across puddles
and built solid
homes for frogs.
Bored, I’d
flatten my face
against the glass
door for effect,
and finally drag
myself in,
knuckles almost
scraping across the stained
carpet and pull myself up beside him.
Other days, sent on an errand by Mom,
I’d stop in by myself, blinded
by the sudden dark and drink
short cold Cokes on Dad’s tab.
But mostly, like now, I didn’t like
going in alone, reading all the signs
to keep my eyes busy, never knowing
what to say to the woman next to me.
A number of his poems are filled with booze
and/or death. In “Gone, Fishing” the opening
lines are “if it weren’t you who died/ it would
have been me:”
While in “Directive,” the opening stanza is “When
death unzips
me/let there be no struggle to pick a stone.”
Then again we learn in “A Husk Under the Gum” we
learn from “…on
Fridays, Dad at the bar,/Mom folded out on the
couch…” that Phillis’s
parents were neither the most loving nor caring
parents, or that perhaps
they are worn out from their week of work and
whatever else they
did and their child was not No. 1 on their hit
parade.
Then there is the title poem which opens: “Our
neighbor’s wife has left him,”
There is not a lot of happiness in these poems, no
matter who it is and perhaps
there are other poems and happier times for Randy
Phillis. Nonetheless these poems
are well written, entertaining, maybe even
captivating in their own (somewhat) depressing way.
More importantly they present honest personal
experiences and present poets with
a good lesson on how to write about their own
lives.
__________________________________________
Zvi A. Sesling
Author, King
of the Jungle (Ibbetson Street, 2010)
and Across
Stones of Bad Dreams (Cervena Barva, 2011)
Editor, Muddy
River Poetry Review
Editor,
Bagel Bards Anthologies No. 7 & No. 8
Publisher, Muddy
River Books