Customer Reviews

The Art of Bicycling: A Treasury of Poems

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

After those long rides, do you find yourself inarticulate, reduced to cliché or worse: "Great ride, dude - we pounded pavement today." How about amazing your friends with phrases like this one, from Puritan Against the Wind, by Gus Ferguson: "When every pedal stroke's a bore / When bum and back and neck are sore / When flesh is mortified for sure, / Then, I believe, my soul will soar."

The Art of Bicycling: a Treasury of Poems (Breakaway Books 2005), edited by former Bicycling Magazine assistant editor Justin Belmont, is a moving collection of bicycling poetry covering the entire history of transcendence in the two-wheeled saddle. Remember all those epiphanies you've had hammering uphill under a hot sun 70 miles into a century, or gliding down through freezing rain, eyes tearing? No? That's ok - someone else wrote them down, and they're in this book. As Justin says in the Introduction, The Art of Bicycling is "[n]ot just [about] the machine itself, in its bare essential elements, its crank and sprocket clusters, but the range of joys and pains and memories it inspires in . . . the psyche of the cyclist."

Disclaimer: one of my poems is in here. But, being a poet, I don't actually get paid, so big deal. And, I am capable of being critical: Justin didn't put in two of my poems.

Actually, he didn't put in two of anybody's, except for that world-renowned sprinter, Anonymous. But he did put in poems by Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas, C.K. Williams, Rita Dove, Seamus Heaney, William Stafford, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and other famous poets you may not recognize. Plus, there are lots of folks like me with day jobs. Who are these people? There's a handy-dandy biographical sketch of each poet in the back, and an index to first lines for when you've forgotten the title (or remember it, but it is simply "Bicycle", like dozens of others). And there are some pretty slick photos too. Like the peleton in the snow, the leopard-suited woman trick-or-treating on a bike, the old bike nailed to a barbed-wire fence in the desert, the pace line passing the "NO BICYCLES ALLOWED" sign with utter indifference.

Ahhh, but back to the poems themselves. Here's a sampling of a few of my faves. That mystical beast, the bicycle itself, was never better described than in Derek Peat's poem, Bicycle: "Since Thursday last, the bare living-room / of my flat's been occupied / by a stranger from the streets, a light-limbed traveler: / pine-needle spokes, bright rims, the savage downward / curve (like polished horns) / of its handlebars, denote / some forest deity, or deity of highway / and sky, has incognito set up residence - the godhead / invoked in a machine." Longing is represented by Gregory Orr's Lament for an unnamed "you" as he passes a girl fixing her chain: "There on the highway's/ edge where gusts / from passing cars / whipped the grass / like wind off the sea / and she was kneeling, / her arms moving / among the metal spokes / plucking from them / a music lost / in the louder / impersonal sound / of traffic (and I thought / of you / as I drove past)." And then, of course, there's the "splendor of our life" described so well in Maybe Alone on My Bike by Pacific Northwesterner William Stafford: "O citizens of our great amnesty: / We might have died. We live. Marvels / coast by, great veers and swoops of air / so bright the lamps waver in tears / and I hear in the chain a chuckle I like to hear." And the poignant small moments of life, like the letting go of a child as she first tastes independence on her bike, portrayed by Linda Pastan in To a Daughter Leaving Home: "I kept waiting / for the thud / of your crash as I / sprinted to catch up, / while you grew / smaller, more breakable / with distance, / pumping, pumping / for your life, screaming / with laughter, / the hair flapping / behind you like a / handkerchief waving / goodbye."

Yes, this is the pure essence of bicycling expressed, and therefore it is life, juiced. The Art of Bicycling should be on every cyclist's shelf. It also makes a great but economical gift for those riding buddies on your list who just don't quite rate Dura-Ace.

That notorious philosopher, Anonymous, reminds us why we ride in A Quiet Revery: "God bless my wheel! it knows nor care nor strife, / For one day out the ever-coming seven / I run with it far from the hells of life, / To find in nature's handiwork a heaven." And perhaps it is because, as John Morgan suggests in The Cyclist, every cyclist is a sort of poet, that each of you may find in this collection the same solace you find upon your bicycle:

By the late sheen of an arctic sky
alive with branches shimmying with
light he comes to me: the cyclist,
active, floating, magical, observant,
and the poem comes from him -
whatever he can make it: the hope
that what he turns to will take hold.

I write poetry, even cycling poems, and this book is an inspiration.

It covers the entire history of cycling.

It is not just about the bike, however, but also about the experience of cycling itself in all its variety.

A wonderful read.