In August Kleinzahler's most powerful and inventive collection to date, he succeeds in creating a new idiom for American lyric poetry that captures the velocity and swerves of contemporary life. Kleinzahler's breadth of emotional register and his variety of subject matter are remarkable. The effects can be haunting, sometimes dazzling, always memorable.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Green Sees Things in Waves signals a great leap forward for August Kleinzahler. He has always been a fine musician. Here, however, he goes beyond the image-based poem, and renders a fluid consciousness in a manner that is at once precise and expansive. The most striking formal quality is the syntax. On a smaller scale, it enables the poet to pull off some wonderful, almost hieratic touches: note how he ascribes "that narrow russet instrument of face" to his subject in "Vulture Under the Palisades." On a larger scale, his syntactical play allows Kleinzahler to pepper his poetry with pop culture, Americana, the everyday, and his touching and intimate observations of people. All of these qualities are expertly packed into this sinuous sentence from the memorable "Snow in North Jersey":
It is with a terrible deliberatenessHere as elsewhere, the poet constantly shifts focus, both visually and in terms of diction. Yet even as reality and dream "mingle and dissipate," Kleinzahler always affirms the ultimate reality of the imagination. --Mark Rudman
that Mr. Ruiz reaches into his back pocket
and counts out $18 and change for his LOTTO picks
while in the upstairs of a thousand duplexes
with the TV on, cancers tick tick tick
and the snow continues to fall and blanket
these crowded rows of frame and brick
with their heartbreaking porches and castellations
and the red '68 Impala on blocks
and Joe he's drinking again and Myrna's boy Tommy
in the old days it would have been a disgrace
and Father Keenan's not been having a good winter
and it was nice enough this morning
till noon anyhow with the sun sitting up there like a crown
over a great big dome of mackerel sky.
From Publishers Weekly
Kleinzahler's casual manner belies his subtle, capacious sense of what lyric can do. His new poems depict a frisky, smart-alecky dog who is an expert on WWI poets; a pair of elderly, stranded small-town muses; the headachy ex-acidhead of the title; and the cute "little toughies" on Sunday morning streets. Longer poems analyze Chinese medicine; mull over a "bad feeling"("I call it Dolph"); and describe the light on the New Jersey Palisades. As in his last book, Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow (1995), Kleinzahler shuffles impressionistic, descriptive poems in among rarer subgenres: edgy monologues, dream-visions, beast-fables, epigrams and film noir adventures. His work balances seemingly offhand notation against large elegiac intentions, much as it sets the slang his characters use against comic, or precise, five-dollar wordsA"magisterial," "griseous," "perpend." Drawing for structure and attitude on Frank O'Hara and Wallace Stevens, and for details on Ezra Pound, Thom Gunn and the freewheeling mannerisms of the Beats, Kleinzahler's best poems seem improvisatory, even jotted, at first ("My freight elevator makes a distant whump/ then squeals to a stop on the floors back there/ behind my left ventricle/ OUT OF SERVICE/ for months, I am at first alarmed then refreshed"), but they deepen on rereading, revealing a secret seriousness. Kleinzahler's sometimes friendly, sometimes confrontational tones, winning vigor and idiosyncratic speech rhythms give these ambitious oddities grace and lasting appeal.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Kleinzahler's masterpiece,
This review is from: Green Sees Things in Waves (Hardcover)
With this book, August Kleinzahler -- already one of those fascinating poets who makes you glad that you live in the present moment -- has given us a strong, strange, unique and utterly memorable collection of poems. In poems like "Snow in New Jersey" and "Uttar Pradesh" he combines the textures and techniques of a short story writer with the roving eye of a documentary film-maker using a hand-held camera that allows him to venture anywhere and everywhere, with the result that the reader never knows where he is going next. There is more of a concern here with language in itself, that is, language considered as more than a mere medium of representation, than in his previous work (see "52 Pick-up"); yet at the same time, the new poems show more narrative and a greater facility for following complex, often associative patterns of thought. Best of all are the surprises -- to take just one (although admittedly my favorite) example, the twelfth line of "The Dog Stoltz," which practically knocked me off my feet. Kleinzahler's new poems are so contemporary, so accurate, so detailed, and so relevant that they put the front page of the New York Times to shame.
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