Customer Reviews

A Bedroom Occupation: Love Elegies

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

 

 

In "A Bedroom Occupation" Mark Scott dazzles us with the some of the same qualities that were so apparent in his earlier "Tactile Values." The distinctive voice is here, the Emersonian troping, the remarkable ear for what Frost called "the sound of sense." But there's more- a rare combination of tenderness and anger, expertly modulated and underlined by the poetry's formal conceits. The obvious allusion is to classical Latin poetry filtered through the English canon. At the same time, there's something reminiscent of Henry Miller- not in any narrow sense of obscenity (unless by obscene we mean "off the scene," hidden, unsaid and virtually unthought) but in the poetry's sense of the body as a stubborn taskmaster, taking us to absurd and awkward places, making us hard or wet against our wills, and carrying our emotions along for the ride. Unlike many a workshop poet tied to convenient epiphanies, Scott knows that emotions are bodily forces, not readily coralled by punctual moral awakenings. There are no easy resolutions here. Just the consolations of a life honestly faced.

I sat reading this book on a 747, having my way made for me from South Carolina to Osaka. The poems go down so well that readers not equal to their disarming address go in risk of feeling un-flattered by a *lack* of the specious complexities we have come to know too well in American poetry. There is something close to perfection in the world-weariness of these lines, and what keeps that manner from becoming mannered is Scott's almost unspeakable candor & circumspection. He will take anyone aback. The great thing is to have in these pages always some motive there of self-impeachment. There are indispensable books in this writer, not least because he takes back from the "confessional" poets (and a good many "work-shop" poets into the bargain) the "bedroom territory," the "family territory," that they manifestly moved in on, so to speak, and have occupied for more decades now than quite bear mentioning. As for that self-impeachment, and why it is a great thing: Well, not even the worst sort of bookish fool popping in at a Borders or a Barnes & Noble somewhere could fail to see that this is no little black book of conquests. Not that Scott had to *not* make the book such a thing. These elegies tell us he couldn't have: the melancholy in them is simply too sound, too sane. Instead, Scott chose to write along that precipice over which so many greater egos (and lesser minds) fall, and--as with Chaplin in "City Lights," skating effortlessly for his lover in the dark department store of everyone's mind, a blindfolded cupid--Mark Scott's good grace said "No" to the falling. He stops just short in going as far as he does toward forging what *really is* a new idiom in which to talk about love and lovers in these forlorn United States. How wonderful, by the way, to begin the book as Scott does. All that needs to be done to put the reader in the right place is done in the first poem, and the rest is velvet, as Robert Frost might say. There is nothing in these poems that Mark Scott has not already "heard" there, by anticipation, on just about any reader's behalf. Which means that he does that remarkable thing: remains always with the reader and somehow out ahead of him. Frost managed that trick of real generosity, but precious few others have in recent decades, if my own somewhat disaffected grazing in the fields & sod-farms of contemporary verse is any indication. And now what I have been looking for, I have found. So engaging is "A Bedroom Occupation" that I neither can stop reading it, nor wish to.

See also: Tactile Values (New Issues Poetry & Prose)

A Bedroom Occupation must be one of the finest volumes of poetry to appear in some time. It is rich and wild and true and classically informed, a veritable tour de force. Horace, Catullus, Tibullus, move over and make room for one of your kind, an abrasive romantic afraid neither of sentiment or skepticism.

David Solway