Customer Reviews

Interloper: Poems

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Ideas in Interloper cruise like planetesimals through space. Concrete in a void, but falling brilliantly to pieces. In their ore they match Earth's make-up, but their tireless trajectories are distinct. They are alien, desolate and intrepid.

Without cohesion, they share elements with one another, and it is evident they issue from the same source. But Klatt's identity as a speaker is chimerical. Oddball. He is an interloper if not the Interloper of whom he speaks. He is a magician presticogitating rocketships, and making the poems his captain's log.

Instead of Arithmetic, he uses metaphors to plot their course. Instead of Science, he charts their elements in simile. But don't misunderstand, his words hinge on both of these fields, demonstrating how poetry is a pungent science. A magical mathematics.

Because of this, Klatt's poetics defy poetry. In poems such as, "Reliquary," "Magnolia," and "Siren in Middle Age," Klatt delves beyond the limited orthography of the Latin Alphabet, employing self-constructed ideograms, charts, graphs, and musical notation to catalog his mercurial subjects.

Where normally this requires pretension from the poet, these schematics don't take themselves too seriously. They engage the reader in a sort of baffling comedy; it is as if the reader is deciphering simple Egyptian hieroglyphs, using the voice of the poet as a singing Rosetta stone.

I don't want to give the impression that all of the subject matter is spacebound. It isn't. Several poems are dedicated to the bucolic. To root vegetables and fruits. But even in his rustic poems, he is able to create a cosmic feel. As in "Fetus in Orbit," where he speaks lovingly of primordial cows. Poems like this, and poems like, "Test Pilots Among the Haymakers," "Lines composed on an Open Space," and "Wandering of Light," make it obvious that Klatt's poems are about frontiers. About unexplored spaces, using unexplored diction.

Despite their cosmic ideas, all of his poems are brief. No longer than a page. Efficient and meteoric. And after reading this book, we can't know if Klatt wrote the rocketship to study the comets, or to join them. But this much we do know: to be the poet is to be the pilot and it takes guts to tackle asteroids.