Customer Reviews

Land of Cockaigne

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

With his first full-length book in a dozen years, Ed Ochester once again steps to the front of American poetry and crushes the competition in the process. Land of Cockaigne is a collection of narrative and lyric poems about working people and the pains and joys of everyday living. Equally laugh-outloud funny and moan-outloud terrible, these poems take us into the country of Western Pennsylvania to meet such fascinating characters as Clyde, Clyde's son and the girl Clyde's son has just "made" pregnant, and then these poems rush us back into the city to say goodbye to the old Pittsburgh Airport and discover the Flying Tigers hanging at a hotel bar. The best poems in this collection (the 5+ star poems) are set in Key West and certainly Hemingway would love Ochester's clean lines and brave emotional stance (as the woman at the Half Shell Bar says, "'there are two anagrams for the word fear:/... everything and run and/face everything and recover' and/ I'm trying to do the latter..."). Whether you love Billy Collins or Robert Frost, Charles Bukowski or Sharon Olds, the best poems you're missing right now are by Ed Ochester. Immediately check out this book.

ED OCHESTER'S LAND OF COCKAIGNE IS IN THE BEST WHITMANESQUE TRADITION.THESE POEMS MADE ME LAUGH AND CRY. THEY ARE SO TRUE TO THE HUMAN CONDITION, AND HOW MANY POEMS CAN YOU SAY THAT ABOUT TODAY? READ THESE AND SEE IF YOU AGREE.

The poetry of Ed Ochester is descriptive, humorous, compassionate, superbly crafted, and will linger in the mind, heart, and imagination of his reader. How To Read It: Every good poem says I love you/I'm sorry you will die/and how we cry at that/how every good specific image/brings us back to the one great thing/we had forgotten: the way at the ocean/on a calm summer afternoon we/look at the bright red sails/and suddenly are dazzled by/endless shimmer and light/burning the great joy of/water, the sodium-lamp/brilliance of each/tiny wave.

I thought this was a terrific book! The poems are full of interesting, smart, and (gasp!) funny characters and voices, as well as wonderful, startlingly beautiful images. It is not a book about the pleasures of theorizing abstract principles, however. The poems are in the service of something else: opening up the heart, making the reader both laugh at and sympathize with the struggle to be human.

The only readable writing in this skimpy book is in the epigraphs. The poems themselves (if one can even apply that word to the ungainly, flat-footed items on exhibit here) rarely rise above the level of the vanity press. Contemporary poetry doesn't get much more negligible than this.

Ochester's "poetry" is a thin stream of drab blabber.