Come on All You Ghosts [Paperback]

Matthew Zapruder (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 31, 2010

"Charming, melancholy, hip."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Zapruder's innovative style is provocative in its unusual juxtapositions of line, image and enjambments. . . . Highly recommended."—Library Journal

Matthew Zapruder's third book mixes humor and invention with love and loss, as when the breath of a lover is compared to "a field of titanium gravestones / growing warmer in the sun." The title poem is an elegy for the heroes and mentors in the poet's life—from David Foster Wallace to the poet's father. Zapruder's poems are direct and surprising, and throughout the book he wrestles with the desire to do well, to make art, and to face the vast events of the day.

Look out scientists! Today the unemployment rate
is 9.4 percent. I have no idea what that means. I tried
to think about it harder for a while. Then
tried standing in an actual stance of mystery
and not knowing towards the world.
Which is my job. As is staring at the back yard
and for one second believing I am actually
rising away from myself. Which is maybe
what I have in common right now with you . . .

Matthew Zapruder holds degrees from Amherst College, UC Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts. He is the author of two previous books, including The Pajamaist, which won the William Carlos Williams Award and was honored by Library Journal with a "Best Poetry Book of the Year" listing. He lives in San Francisco and is an editor at Wave Books.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Zapruder's third collection of hip, quirkily haunting yet surprisingly earnest poems is his best and most beautiful. He spans the major genres--love poetry ("I admire/ and fear you, to me you are an abyss/ I cross towards you"), elegy ("I have been coasting,/ but from this forward Grace I vow/ I shall coast no more"), ode ("my friends ordered square burgers/ with mysterious holes leaking a delicious substance"), friendship tribute ("Dobby lives/ in Minnesota and seems basically happy"), to name a few--updating them for the 21st century. He even proves himself to be a charming nature poet: of a fox he says, "it held a grasshopper in its mouth,/ which it dropped when it saw the small carcass of a young javelina." These poems are still full of quick jump-cuts, seeming tangents, and almost adorable imagery, but all more focused on subject matter. In the spooky but also companionable titular long poem that closes the volume, Zapruder communes with an array of unseen presences, from the reader to the shades of his family and influences: "Come with me/ and I will show you/ terrible marvels.// The little cough I heard in my mind/ was one I remembered/ my father made just as he died."
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Zapruder’s poems are ordered by dream logic that melds the familiar with the mysterious. Yet as brain-teasing as his wonderfully strange yet exactly right imagery is, the formal elements of his poems are so liquid and magnetizing as to be invisible. A poet of both respect and resistance, Zapruder has a penchant for disarming opening lines, such as, “I hate the phrase ‘inner life,’” or, “I like the word pocket.” The latter launches a poem in which contemplation of a pocket—how peculiar and gravid the word becomes with repetition—leads to a vision of a wrecked airplane at the bottom of the sea. Zapruder writes with compassion and bafflement about loneliness and the broadcasting of war and other catastrophes, and he remembers his dead with candor and tenderness. Zapruder also ponders the unnerving juxtapositions of our world of earbuds, “sad crushed plastic,” and giant particle colliders. Of abundance and impoverishment, relentless connectivity and isolation in plain sight. “I am never / at ease.” “I feel like a mountain of cell phone chargers.” “I examine my feelings without feeling anything.” And yet these are deeply felt, exciting, and caring poems, droll and wistful, obliquely affirming, phosphorescently beautiful. --Donna Seaman

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press (August 31, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556593228
• ISBN-13: 978-1556593222
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #299,161 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Sentimental music July 19, 2011

By DabblerArts

Format:Paperback

This is not an unpleasant reading experience, and Zapruder himself gives every impression of being the nicest, most sociable guy on earth - so really we should be thankful that poets aren't the formidable breed they used to be. The poetry is likewise incredibly friendly and chatty. Most of the poems can be summarized like this: I did something, random fact X, I did something else, random fact Y, I don't know what I think or feel, but I definitely think and feel something. The result is poetry that's less images and ideas (as images are deliberately farfetched, and ideas unclear) than a kind of verbal texture, a kind of music if you will - difficult to quote (but not to understand the point).

There are no outstanding poems here. This is the start of a poem called "Never to Return":

Today a ladybug flew through my window. I was reading
about the snowy plumage of the Willow Ptarmigan
And the song of the Nasshville Warbler. I was reading
the history of weather, how they agreed at last
to disagree on cloud categories. I was reading a chronicle
of the boredom that called itself The Great Loneliness
and caused a war...

Repetitive stuff, but don't think too hard and a pleasant oblivion takes effect. It goes on for a while like this, then near the bottom of the page the poem ends:

I know less than I did before, and I live on a hill where
the wind steals music from everything and bring it to me.

Even more interesting passages resist much independent meaning. Here's the end of a poem called "Travelers Among Mountains and Streams," a bit of Japonaiserie:

Between my ears is drifting now
the strange translucent golden word
axolotl. Through its whole life it never
grows any older. Through its shoulders
you can see its blood. Thousands of miles
away THE EAST a kingdom covered
by giant clouds. Where was I born? Among
human faces, deep in the sun of a real
young mother, under blowing unmagical snow.

That poem and "As I Cross the Heliopause at Midnight, I Think of My Mission" are likely the best poems in this collection - but as indicated, Zapruder is nothing if not consistent, and the poems all say very similar things.

The title sequence is weak, and ends things on a too saccharine note I think. It's an invitation to the dance, extended toward the poet's guiding spirits as well as to the reader - but I find it self-conscious and strangely unmoving.

I guess this poetry is like alternative rock - genial enough, enjoyable, but a mite vacuous. The poems constantly threaten to break into song, while the music it sings is too self-same and not particularly memorable.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Smile for the big idea hooks May 22, 2012

By L. M. Myers

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I had a very similar initial reaction as the reviewer who found the book pleasant in tone, but overall too light, too inconsequential-seeming. Despite wanting to like the book, and despite finding the speaker very charming, my first thought was that it all sounded like recycled Ashbery-air ("Hello everyone, hello you. Here we are under this sky"--"Aglow").

Except for the Tu Fu poem--that one stood out to me from the beginning. The images are clear and engaging, but pass quickly and via unexpected contrasts. The lines are also shorter, yet spaced-out. The overall effect is that vivid and delightful impressions are pushed at and *past* me faster than I want them to move, which creates emotional tension--I find myself latching onto the pleasure of the moment offered in one image and a handful of brief lines, only to suffer their loss in the next sentence--and rapidly:

After Reading Tu Fu, I Emerge From a Cloud of Falseness

wearing a suit of light.

It's too easy to be

strange. I glow

reading a few pages

of an ancient Chinese poet

to calm me, but soon

I am traveling down

terrible roads

like an insect chased

by golden armies.

Then I am tired in a little boat

filling with smoke.

So, I think that poem reveals an elegance and sharpness in both its concerns and construction that belie its pleasant tone.

And on second read, I noticed less Ashbery-air threatening to hotbox the collection with hazy, flittery musings about nothing of consequence, and found more of a running counter-story to lightness. "Erstwhile Harbinger Auspices", "Burma", and "Little Voice", eg, are all serious about capturing the near-non-feeling of disconnection from self, of the loss of anchor (cultural, familial) in a shared past, and of a sense of pervasive loneliness and isolation despite being surrounded by people people people. Take an excerpt from "Erstwhile Harbinger Auspices", the opening poem, as an example:

...The air
was thus a huge announcement.
Today it's completely
transparent, a vase. Inside it
flowers flower. Thus
a little death scent. I have
no master but always wonder,
what is making my master sad?
Maybe I do not know him.

A number of poems here seem to be engaged in clarifying a wide variety of ways the self cannot be gone *into*. "Burma" is in couplets (mostly), and like the Tu Fu poem, works its way through disappointments or failings of the self via elements in opposition.

In any case, when I re-read the poems noted above, I found myself wondering about what initially seemed to be the pleasant tone of the poems in this collection. I'm starting to wonder if this book is actually about working into a quietly revealed terror at being able to feel so little, despite there being so much to lose in life (e.g., beauty, love, a sense of wonder and connection in general...).

Maybe the real tone of the book is not sentimentality at all, but rather a kind of hopeless--or worse, false--pleasantness in the face of relentless ironies:

Clearly life is a drag, by which I mean a net that keeps
pulling the most unsavory and useful boots we
either put on lamenting, or eat with the hooks of some
big idea gripping at the sides of our mouths, and yanking them
upward in a conceptual grimace.

(--from "Little Voice")

What I can't tell, here, is whether it's the world that's supposedly inherently tragic and brutal, or our fake attitude towards it. I'll be intrigued to see if in his next book, the author finds a rhetorical stance that allows for the possibility of a critique of the self and its put-on masks.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Zapruder: a cross between WCW, Surrealists, and Stand-Up Poets April 14, 2013

By kingfisher1031

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Zapruder's conversational storytelling in a (usually long-lined) prosy style sets the reader at ease (like a friendly doctor who's going to make mind-dropping pronouncements) and actually helps his lines (and enjambments in particular) feel less pronounced, more subtle. He slowly and smoothly unveils a constant building of familiar objects in tangential spiraling situations toward a slyly returning final sentence that invariably either harkens back to the original topic, or charts a new ocean of discovery.

"You Have Astounding News" (42) is my favorite example of his poetic powers. Firstly, his all-pervasive humor becomes apparent in line 2. Zapruder dares the reader/sociologist to juggle imaginative, clever James Tate-like phrases with dropped dark Jeffrey McDaniel-esque realities... thereby turning his poetry (he leans more towards James Tate than Jeffrey McDaniel) into a fusion reminiscent of the poesy of his fellow stand-up precursors, James Krusoe and Charles Harper Webb [especially in his simpler, thematic poems like "Journey Through the Past" (65) and "Frankenstein Love" (71)] . Like Woody Allen stammering in all his movies, Zapruder's also uniquely employs the occasional repetition of a word or phrase like a verbal tic for musical emphasis; this poem's got two: constant and building. (Hmmm... wasn't that in my sum-up of his modality in the first paragraph? Guess he's self-aware.)

Zapruder infuses his poetry with modern everyday objects, urban landscapes, and scientific and pop culture references. They capture the zeitgeists of this time, which makes them an outwardly mundane yet inwardly familiarizing historical record of our existence told as if he were Woody Allen (again) as a poet in Sleeper, relating "facts" as if they were forgotten territories. His use of images is surrealistically successful, particularly in his poem "Minnesota" (52), where simple, every day adjective and noun phrases like blue vinyl couch, winter sky, robin's egg, great rivers, blue phlox, Canadian Shield glaciers, fertile soil, frozen snow, and onyx nails... and basic nouns like balcony, railing, city, hulls, boulders, stones, squirrel, tree, watchman, and claws... together produce his poem's conceit about looking for things. Also in his poem "Sad News" (75), where, in the same way, with the same purposeful purpose, Zapruder juxtaposes Mars, lions, light bulb, Xerox machine, sharp blade, solar wind, speckles, dust, very tiny oiled hydraulics, vampire bat, unicorn, dead elephants, empty labs, mouth, and binary data stream. Wow!

Zapruder, in Come On All You Ghosts, demonstrates the role of the poet as relating his personal experiences and observations in casually disarming and outright beautiful ways, linking the patterns of his thought tangents by finding the common threads. With his choices of words, phrasing, and (most importantly) linkages, Zapruder is also defining the purpose of a poet to be the unearther of verities who can artistically compel you to become emotionally moved about them.