Customer Reviews

Haywire: Poems (Swenson Poetry Award)

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To highly recommend this book would be an understatement. I couldn't even count the number of times I've picked up a contemporary poetry book and found myself assaulted by the incomprehensible, pretentious verse of someone with too much cleverness and too little heart--but George Bilgere's "Haywire" is different. Here is a poet who not only walks, but glides with ease down that tightrope between accessibility and intellect, between entertainment and (dare I say it?) enlightenment. He takes risks that few modern, "established" poets are willing to take, and he succeeds to such a degree that he almost makes it look easy. All of this, in my not-so-humble opinion, is exactly what good poetry should do.

I also commend Bilgere on not being afraid to address the pink elephant that is pop culture, as he does in "Say My Name", "Simile Practice", and "Norelco". That's something modern poets still largely shy away from, in favor of archaic adaptations of the work of older poets (forgetting, in their ignorance, that these poems were modern when they were written!). But the poems I most admire in this book--"Petroglyphs", "What Would Jesus Do?", and "Waiting"--achieve that delicate blend of good humor and deep sadness that make them, in my opinion, both wonderfully effective and completely essential to the modern canon.

HAYWIRE was waiting for me when I returned for the GR Dodge Poetry Festival last weekend, and in spite my having just bought books and falling way behind at my to-read stacks, I read HAYWIRE first. Wonderful poems. So touching and well-crafted. I keep re-reading them and asking myself why they are so good-- the shock/startle/aha of the endings, the understatement, the juxtaposition of elements, echoes, great details. All the things teachers tell you to do, AND done so well. When I read "Casablanca," I had a moment of confusion. Then realized, This is a fantasy! NONE of these things happened, which deepened the poignancy of the endings. I loved "Anniversary" and "The Table" and "What Would Jesus Do." And I flagged them to hand-copy to study some more.

Bravo! George Bilgere has me as a fan.

First I began noticing George Bilgere's name
on Writer's Almanac. I'm not good at remembering
names, but these were poems I passed along to friends
insisting, "You must read this!" Then I read "The Bridal
Shower." That did it. Bilgere had crawled inside my head
and stolen my unborn poem. Instead of pressing charges,
I ordered Haywire from Amazon. Now I'm stalking Bilgere,
waiting for his next book, watching for poems on-line,
and hoping someday to catch him live at a reading.

If you love poetry, you'll love Bilgere.
You'll love how he pulls in his audience by using accessible
language and wit to do extraordinary things--like putting
little bits of your own life on paper. He remembers moments
you thought you'd forgotten. And, if you don't love poetry,
read Bilgere. He'll change your mind.

This slim volume of poetry is a treasure--prompting the reader to laugh out loud on one page and bringing a tear to the eye on the next. In the Billy Collins mode, it's poetry that connects.

Yes it sucks you back to a time you feel you lived yourself, into the shoes your feet have walked in, into a dream you've long forgotton only now more vivid. Remarkable..over and over again. Don't let him out of your sight.

George Bilgere, Haywire (Utah State University Press, 2006)

Sometimes you read a poem and it just makes you say "[censored for Amazon consumption]."

After reading Edward Field's introduction to the volume, I was relatively certain I was going to hate it. Field goes on and on about how Bilgere is a political poet who talks in the voice of the common man blah blah blah. You know what? I hear political poetry in the voice of the common man most every day, and all of it, every last word, sucks green donkey butt. Always for the same reason: the poet lets the message get in the way of the art of crafting a poem. And so I'm going along reading Field's intro and assuming I'm going to be reading yet another volume of crap that's one shuffle-step above that abomination known as slam poetry. And I turned the page.

The first "[censored for Amazon consumption]" moment hit me on page 8, with the poem "The Bear."

"The first thing I saw
when I came to visit my friend
in the hospice at the edge of town
was an old woman holding a bear.

She was in a wheelchair on the lawn,
staring out at the lake.
A heavy-set young Candy Striper
was trying to administer some meds
but the woman was nursing her bear
and she wasn't about to stop.

That's how life is.
You enter into it from the darkness
of your mother's womb
and someone hands you a bear...."

And it keeps on going for another page or so like that, savage and yet so full of a gentle playfulness, and you realize there is, in fact, a political dimension to all this (in this poem, it's more a spiritual one, I guess, a kind of crisis of existentialism), but what Field was going on about is nowhere in evidence, and for that I am all too grateful.

And I should say that this was not the volume's only "[censored for Amazon consumption]" moment, not by a longshot. Every other poem or so Bilgere cranks up the wonder machine and lets fly with another piece that varies the theme somewhat. There's the political, yes, and the humor varies in its approach from the gentleness above to the satirical to the gleefully profane, but it all works. It's just so. damn. good.

As hard as I tend to be on poetry (and I freely admit that I'm much, much harder on poetry than I am other forms of writing), it seems to me that almost every year three or four volumes make it into my Best Reads of the Year list, and I've probably given more five-star reviews to poetry than to anything else. I lost my book journal in a computer crash back in June of 2007, and so only have information easily to hand for the period since, but since June 17, 2007, I have given fifteen five-star reviews. Four of those have been volumes of poetry, if you count this one. (Five have been novels, two have been plays--both by Martin McDonagh--and the remaining have gone to graphic novels.) Okay, so I was wrong, but pretty durned close. I love the good stuff as much as I hate the bad stuff. And this, my friends, is the good stuff, right up there with Richard Siken's Crush and Cat Valente's A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects and Donald Hall's Without.Guaranteed to be somewhere in the top three when this year's Best Reads list comes out. (It's currently in a two-horse race with one of the McDonagh plays.) *****

If you don't like these poems, then you know nothing about poetry. you know nothing about the "craft" of writing, the use of temporal space and the creative genius it takes to tackle the intangibles.

There is so much garbage poetry out there that has the emotion of an owner's manual for a leaf blower. Poet's (even some good ones) forget sometimes that average human beings are their target audience, and that Poetry (like all art) is about communicating the human condition."Accessible" poets have been lambasted ad nauseum by intellectual elitists who believe that a great poem is a Rubik's cube that needs to be solved. They forget that a great poet doesn't need to dizzy the reader with linguistic acrobatics to communicate complexity. A great poet can communicate all of the complexities of the world using regular 'ol language.

Putting it in layman's terms: if you don't appreciate and respect this poetry, then you don't know a goddamn thing about poetry.