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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Outstanding 3rd Collection, May 19, 2003
This review is from: Love Song with Motor Vehicles (American Poets Continuum) (Paperback)
This, Alan Michael Parker's third collection, is his best. It's brilliant--intellectually rigorous, complex, and musically exciting. Parker's poems are delightful and (at times) funny without resorting to easy, winking irony. His series on the gods--a sort of experimental ars poetica--is at once hilarious and deeply moving, as is "The Librarian's Song," among others. I'm a fan of Alan Michael Parker's first two books--Days Like Prose and The Vandals--but his achievement here is astonishing.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another Fine One from Parker, May 19, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: Love Song with Motor Vehicles (American Poets Continuum) (Paperback)
Love Song with Motor Vehicles is another upwelling from that primordial river to which Alan Parker seems to have unlimited access. An astringent but loving wit courses through the real and the imagined, hunting proof of extinct perspectives chanted back to life. As in his first two volumes, Parker's ancient voices are new to us, and surprisingly protean, this time in a quiet way. Parker sees through eyes we didn't know we had, performing for a cast of characters that vibrate into existence at his glance. His narrators are fresh and cunning, and if not always disturbing, then disturbable, which can often be the same thing. They are as urbane as they are primal - that's part of what Parker always does. John Edwards, Publisher
Cambridge Springs Press
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This One Asks the Big Questions, May 29, 2003
This review is from: Love Song with Motor Vehicles (American Poets Continuum) (Paperback)
For this reader, Parker's new book turns a significant corner in a poetic career. His debut volume (Days Like Prose, '97) marked his as a sharply distinctive new voice. The second collection was freshly formalist, deceptively fun, and a great read; five years later I still think it's no less than brilliant (The Vandals, `99). That book's success was a potential problem for Parker's third volume, in the hard-act-to-follow department. But with Love Song, Parker has become the kind of poet I'll continue to read from volume to volume, because his lifetime work will repay that investment. These poems follow The Vandals in every right sense, including leaving them behind, all but the echoes. Now what was there from the start really comes clear for me - though his voice and his sensibility are postmodern, Parker is an elegiac poet whose vocation is representing mutability, very much in the 17th century metaphysical sense. His speakers are smitten with the sentient world (in which they include enlivened objects), identifying with as many doors and vases as with people, and they're always finding unlooked-for qualities to be curious about, and then to love. Equally balanced between celebration and dirge, often in the same poem, he is maturing into a poet interested in the big questions, asked in small ways: how to live intensely with the knowledge of mortality, how to "delight in our daily dying," and then how to "go to the door/ and step out, and be gone." (These lines come from the first and last poems in the volume.) As time goes on, I read only the poets who ask such stuff of their art.
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