Jan 22 2009
{book review} george looney: the precarious rhetoric of angels
Isn’t that a beautiful, evocative title for a book? I mean, you read that and you haven’t a clue what it means, but it sounds pretty, right? Which probably sums up how a lot of people tend to feel about poetry, and I admit that often goes for me too. I adore T.S. Eliot, but do I have a clue what, say, The Waste Land actually means? Yeah, not so much. To be honest I suppose I’m especially wary of analyzing poems I really love, because I’d rather enjoy Eliot for his marvelous imagery and wordplay than say “Clearly, J. Alfred Prufrock is sexually frustrated.”
Even when I read a poem like one of Eliot’s and have no idea precisely what, if anything, he’s trying to say with it, I still tend to find myself coming away with some idea of what the poem’s about, even if I can’t always put it into words. I suppose that’s one of my biggest criteria for any kind of art: it should mean something, whether I’m positive what that something is or not. Art that makes me go “Uh…what was the point of all that?” rarely counts as art in my book, if for no other reason than because the simple fact that I’m wondering what the point was means I wasn’t distracted by something else, like how pretty it was.
I suppose that sort of problem tends to be exaggerated in poetry anthologies. All the poems have to be different, but they also have to be interconnected somehow if there’s any reason to have them put together in that way, at least if the poet wants to create something greater than the sum of its parts rather than just going, “Hey, here’s a bunch of poems I wrote since the last time I published an anthology.” That’s the sort of problem that shows up in this book.
I first came across George Looney’s poem “The Only Sober Lover” in a 2005 issue of Alaska Quarterly Review, a literary journal published by the University of Alaska Anchorage (don’t knock it, apparently it’s a good literary magazine as such things go, even coming from where it does). I suppose I tend to take a fairly dim view of writing that appears to be literary for the sake of being literary, which of course is going to happen often in a literary magazine, and”The Only Sober Lover” was a refreshing change from much of the other writing in that issue. It seemed to me like one of very few poems in there that seemed to make a little sense and have some purpose other than Being Artsy. It’s not available online anywhere–Looney’s not that well-known, apparently–so I typed it up; it’s a bit long but well worth the read.
“The Only Sober Lover”
George Looney
Much of the sorrow of being
aware is that
memory has no suburbs;
it just ends abruptly with the last
lighted house before
the blank dark of fields. Still,
we can remember long after remembering
gets us anywhere.
Other times, it happens we can’t
remember another’s touch, despite
every effort,
some night we need to. Forget
is what the locals have named
the main street
in town, and it leads out
to uncultivated fields full of
a flower no one
remembers the name of. Burning
in sunlight, this wild yellow
flower can’t forgive
anyone. Any confession made
to these blazing fields is burnt
by the saying,
so charred it’s unrecognizable.
Locals sip beer and throw back shots
in lawn chairs
on their porches. They say
there’s only one dentist in town,
and he suffers
from insomnia. They hear drilling
all through the nights, no one
in the chair
waiting to spit. Passion doesn’t
have dental records. Its charred body
remains a mystery,
unidentified. Buried without ceremony,
some say it haunts them. Woken
by the sound
of the dril, they want to find
a stone carved only with dates
and cover it
with wild flowers they picked
in a field at the edge of town.
Grills send up smoke
from backyards where children
play ghost. They can’t remember,
sometimes, the name
they’re supposed to be, and so lose
themselves in the game and go home
with drunk parents,
lineage an often tricky question.
The warranties have run out
on everything
in town. The repair shop
has odd hours, its shelves always
loaded down
with things people need that need
to be fixed. The dentist, drunk,
has been seen
pressed against the store-front
glass, seeming to salute
whatever it is
that’s his on the shelves. Always
at dusk, a fragile moon reflected
even fainter in
the glass that has taken on
the illusion of darkness, the result
of the confluence
of different light. Sorrow is
more than thin smudges of smoke
rising, reflected,
toward the moon in the glass
of the repair shop’s store-front,
more than any
faint resemblance to a salute
could account for. It’s our name
for the vague sense
of loss even the children
feel here. It’s worst for lovers
like the dentist
or the repair man, or the old
drunks watching everything go by
from their porches,
almost but never quite sleeping.
There have been rumors for years
construction is about
to begin in the fields that blind
anyone heading out of town, rumors
of new houses
and streets laid out so straight
no one could get lost. Listening
to rumors only
makes it harder to remember
what has to be done. The flowers,
wild, a kind of
lightin those untouched fields,
are also a kind of memory,
always out there.
It’s said at dusk they glow,
letting off what they’ve taken in
all day. Which
are picked and which are left
to reproduce is a question of
chance, not design.
And every confession whispered to
the flowers finally makes it
back to town,
to hover at the edge
of seeing, caught sometimes in
the quick turn
of a head, in the corners
of eyes. The optometrist is
the only sober
lover in town. He goes home
every night to a woman whose name,
when he says it,
makes him do a little dance
and start to hum a love song
the radio has
long since forgotten. Every day
he brings her a bouquet of
flowers that glow
and light their house all night.
I loved it so much I looked up The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels, one of Looney’s books of poetry, but I’m afraid I was disappointed. “The Only Sober Lover” wasn’t in it, but that wasn’t the problem: the thing is, if you’ve read that poem, you’ve really gotten everything from the book. I still like his style, but a lot of elements felt very repetitive–while I understand the need to have poems thematically linked in an anthology, all of them sort of felt the same. Angels crop up a lot. Drunks and drinking even more so–there’s one or both in probably 98% of the poems in this book. Lots of empty lovers. Loss. Emptiness. Things like that. All of them seem to be set in some small-town, rural setting. I wouldn’t mind reading it over again, because some of the poems were really beautiful and I do like his style, but by the end I felt like I was just reading the same poem over and over again.
