26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bound to be one of this year's best, March 14, 2005
This review is from: Budget Travel through Space and Time: Poems (Paperback)
It's frustrating to see a poet of Mr. Goldbarth's skill and insight so consistently overlooked and underappreciated. He's not in the standard anthologies; his sales on Amazon (at least at the moment that I write this) are perplexingly low.
My suspicion is that this relative neglect is due in part to the complexity of both the poetry and its effect on the reader. What happens in Goldbarth's work is difficult to reduce to a back-of-the-book blurb.
That said, allow me to attempt to sum up What Goldbarth Is Up To, in what might be a bit more than a blurb, but hopefully readably brief.
A typical Goldbarth poem works like this:
First, there's an underlying theme. The four biggies for Mr. G are (1) the double or contradictory nature of life, or a life, or some aspect of life; (2) our never-ending quest for order and structure; (3) the endless itch of our desires, the lengths to which we will go to (fleetingly, then failingly) fulfill them, and the repercussions thereof; and (4) the Goldbarthian ubertheme, obviously related to the first 3 on this list: relationships, the making and the breaking of them, and all points in between. There are others, of course, but these four seem to be the poet's obsessive leitmotifs.
Then the theme is explored through a series of anecdotes, description, history, scholarship, and rumination. Without reproducing a poem in its entirety, it is impossible to convey the intricate, fugue-like weave of connections Goldbarth achieves in these works. An odd detail from the poet's daily experience will be related to a recent discovery in the field of astrophysics, which is in turn connected to an obscure historical oddity, which is then linked to something in today's news. The inventiveness and persuasiveness with which the poet yokes together a constellation of seemingly unrelated details is astounding.
Finally, there's the language: It's as eclectic as his range of subjects, as Goldbarth lifts language from wherever he can: contemporary scientific terminology; hooky gee-whiz 50s lingo; old and middle English; typos or student mispronunciations that G. converts in neologisms (my favorite in this category is the student gaff "zeitgeese. " Later in the poem Goldbarth has a flock of zeitgeese swoop down and peck an outdated book to death); nerdy sci-fi coinages; an appearance of Goldbarth's father brings words like "patoot," "pisher," and "pipsqueak" into the mix.
Ever present is of course Goldbarth's own voice, which, though always unmistakably his, can range from poignantly plain-spoken declarative statements (his favorite way of concluding a poem), to carefully observed--almost imagistic--renderings, to unpredictable and unforgettable metaphors, to almost joycean wordwarpings. Here's where I have a beef with the Library Journal's blurb on the book: it claims Goldbarth "experiments with compound words." My quibble is with "experiments": to my knowledge, Mr. G. has been employing compound words for decades (perhaps since the start of his career, but I've not read anything written before the mid-eighties). I get the sense that it comes not so much from "experimenting" but simply from the poet's urgent rush to get said what needs to be said, in whatever way he can. If that means verbing nouns, he does it. If it means yoking wordmotes together in unlikely minotarian combos, he does it. Whatever gives the articulating urge shape and release.
Goldbarth is at his best in the longer poems, which give the poet's mind and language the freedom to accomplish what I've outlined above. There are several stunners in this collection. "Heart Heart Heart Heart Heart" is about the human rage for order, the ways we try to achieve it: from religion, to serial sex, to family, to academic one-upmanship. Even the poet's mentally disturbed (and hospitalized) friend combats what she calls "The Shapelessless" by chanting the word "heart" over and over, "her nuts `om' of choice." Hence the title. The poet asserts that we want "anything to act as pattern,/ anything to serve for rungs up all-too-empty air." Another long poem, "The Spices," is a showcase for G's breathtaking virtuosity, as is "Where the Membrane is Thinnest."
Perhaps my favorite in this collection is "Called from Out of the Lines of Your Life." The paradox of vagueness or obscurity--how it can both positively and negatively influence our lives-is the subject of this 8 page tour de force. One of the main threads is the story of Eloise and Daniel, two residents of a nursing home. Due to the murkiness of memory, they have forgotten their separate pre-home lives, and believe they are married--a fog-fueled delusion that nonetheless gives them an enlivening sense of purpose and well-being. More, Goldbarth conjectures that it may the obscurity of their perception that allows each of them to see the other as a dream-like ideal. Yet it is also haziness of ethics that allows some families to put grandpa in "the home" before he should be, and the "sloshy language" of nursing home regulations that enables the orderlies to believe they can barge in on Daniel and Eloise, and keep them apart.
A couple subthreads, to give a sense of the poem: Goldbarth relates a couple of anecdotes that show how the "years-long cloudiness" enables us to construct either an appalling or pleasant version of our past. He cites scholarship that conjectures on how the beautiful mistiness of J. M. W. Turner's paintings may have been inspired by the same smog of industrialization that was lamented by William Wordsworth.
The poem is filled with unforgettable Goldbarthian turns of phrase, but what I find most fascinating is how Goldbarth allows his subject, vagueness, to impact his prosody. I could cite a few examples of Goldbarth's amazing use of what I'd call linguistic chiaroscuro, but this review is already too long.
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