Customer Reviews

Hazmat

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Hazmat was a wonderful collection of all sorts of poems. There were Tankas, and Haikus, and even some I didn't know such as Canzone, and Epigram. I thought that these forms were really intricate, and hard to do. I did enjoy the word use though. I thought that it was really cool the way he used words, and painted pictures. An example that sticks in my mind is; She blacks her hair, and powders her face, getting ready to fight the evil. I would recommend this awesome collection to anyone who enjoys grammar and is interested in different forms of poetry. All in all this was a wonderful book comprised of amazing work!

I read a lot and a lot of different genres. There are times I walk into a bookstore or log onto Amazon.com and tell myself: "Pretend you are someone else. Get something outside you're normal realm of taste." Suddenly, I'm buying jazz or British chamber opera, a novel by Someset Maugham, a Britney Spears compilation, a Luchino Visconti film about the Nazis etc.

I've read or skimmed quite a few novels and books of poetry old and new. J. D. McClatchy, a middle-aged gay New Yorker of Celtic decent, is quite simply writing the best contemporary poetry out there. He's published heavily in the elite "Poetry" magazine and turned out several books of poetry and criticism. He's to poems what Michael Cunningham is to novels: simply the most gifted stylist I've encountered.

His style in "Hazmat" has been compared to Baudelaire because his earthy, gritty, sensual, tribal, blue collar themes are presented in precise classical verse. San Francisco poet Tom Gunn and British poet Anthony Hecht and, for that matter, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe all presented decadent subject matter with with a sterling classical sheen. It's an interesting contrast.

McClatchy writes about relevant subject matter like terrorism, like the men's movement, like aging in our youth culture, etc. He escapes the need to wallow in abstraction and mythology and his poems seem, as poems seldom do, torn from the headlines.

The jacket tells you that HAZMAT means "hazardous material" and is an abbreviation used on signs at the entrances to long tunnels and suspicious containers. Well, the poems in J.D. McClatchy's HAZMAT are highly hazardous! Do not fear going through that tunnel or opening that lid. Stunning eye-openers and maximum pleasurable reading from beginning to end. Long live, JD!