Customer Reviews

Love Song with Motor Vehicles (American Poets Continuum)

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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.

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

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.

The release of Alan Michael Parker's third book of poetry is an occasion to rejoice. His work both deals relentlessly with contemporary culture and is informed by an encyclopedic knowledge of literary history. He sees with Shakespeare and Eliot while running a diagnostic on an SUV, as the title of his new collection, _Love Song with Motor Vehicles_, implies. Parker is virtuoso with the English language, who thrills the reader with his music, his intelligence, and the astonishing, lovely risks and leaps of the work.

In _Love Song_ Parker proves, as he did in his two earlier collections, that he is a brilliant craftsman but not merely so; his work is philosophically and psychologically complex, accessible to the reader, and reveals empathy for his subjects. One such moment of philosophical inquiry and personal empathy occurs in his poem, "Text" in which the poet admits "emotions have no words," and meets a woman snowblowing her driveway: "the enormous trumpet of the red machine / blew powder in the air / noise going nowhere as she wept." The poet asks what all real poets must: how can my pretty words account for the suffering of others? what good do they do? There is no answer except in the hope of reaching the reader, as Parker beautifully puts it in the title poem of the collection: "(In the gap /between the picture and the sound / you take my hand.)" This book is always reaching out to you with wit, music, painting, philosophy, and, above all, humanity.

I was first introduced to Mr. Parker's work in The Vandals, an inventive, insightful second collection of poetry. What I like about Mr. Parker's new book is his sense of cultural irony and perspective, the layered sense of mythology against a shapened sense of the domestic.

I read this book while on a plane, and then read it again the following week. If you are looking for a new collection of poems in which to lose yourself, pick up a copy of Love Song with Motor Vechicles. Think James Tate and Charles Simic riffing on Roman gods after spending an afternoon in suburbia.

In this new collection, Alan Michael Parker continues his revved-up, razor-sharp urban myth-making. His poems have the ability to break through the icons of American life--the missed Freeway exit, a handfull of steel wool--and see in them the subtle turnings of America's cultural heart. I can think of no other poet who offers up the carbonated fizz of the post-modern world as well as Alan Michael Park. In this collection as in the last, he sets the modern world against the whirlygig of history, spinning out poem after poem that offer a sophisticated sweetness that lingers long after the candy is gone.

A very strong collection. There are enough poems here that have immediate, powerful impact to teach me patience for those which demand more of my intelligence. Parker's language is also consistently surprising and energetic, tight and musical: the lines are studded with sound events . . . unexpected assonance and slant rhyme. I love how the surface music (the surface play) creates a tug against the deeper emotion in these poems. They manage to be both slick and playful, and deeply felt, too.

There are a number of particularly American portraits here; these are especially good. I'll likely photocopy them for my classes: "Paradise"; "The Piano"; "Librarian's Song"; "Books and Money"; "The Sybil." They strike me as coming near the heart of the book, an American love song to people recognizable from our country, our moment. There's almost something Whitmanian about it . . . except that it's 2003, so there's an ironic edge, a recognizable sharpness to the scenes . . . .

I also admire the stance of this book. How can a book be so far from sentimentality when the speaker tells us over and over again that he loves us? His onliest affection . . . . No small achievement. It's good stuff; it could make you a more careful reader.

This impressive collection will appeal to anyone with the patience to learn to respect what language can do. Parker's poems reward the reader who needs and wants a poem to be more than a banal reflection of life's tedium. At the level of the infinitesimal and universal, these poems bespeak an unmatched sense of poetry's aural and philosophical possibility.

_Love Song with Motor Vehicles_ builds upon Parker's densely and deftly crafted _Days Like Prose_ and the esoteric play of _The Vandals_ to offer verse that achieves the miracle of writing synchronously the infinite and the moment. Parker's poems extend far beyond their time; they echo past traditions (Eliot's "Prufrock" haunts the collection, as the title makes apparent) while they figure as a testament that contemporary poetry (this collection, at least) can balance an attentive poetic craft with an imaginative wit. These poems do not shy from grappling with pain, alienation, and grief; yet they instill a faith that remains long after the poem has finished: here, god literally is in the details (and the draperies, the bath, the broom, the vase), and Parker writes such intricacy with elegance.

Both unflinching and benevolent, these poems heighten our intelligence, embolden our hearts, and sustain our poetic, if not worldly, faith. Moreover, _Love Song with Motor Vehicles_ proffers the inextricability of intellect, love, poetry, and faith--a synthesis we could all do well to cherish, if not hope to express. Parker achieves such expression beautifully.

The poems in this collection are full of questions. These poems ask how a poet can describe the modern world--the domestic, the urban, the gods even--by using the ancient form of poetry.

Parker has a strong control of the line and succint phrasing. Such as in "On the Red Eye" :
Next to me, too cool to be excited,
A teenage girl in black and black and platform shoes
Rewinds a tape, the muted whine
A sound I imagine she hears God make.

I enjoyed the poems with the males voices, in particular, in this set for their truth, for their reflection of people I feel I know.

My favorite poem in this collection is "TV" which just so perfectly captures a moment.

This is the kind of collection that I feel most anyone could read and enjoy. I highly recommend this for the novice to the advanced poetry reader.

Having followed Mr. Parker's poetry through three books, I have to say that this new one is his very best. It's lyrical and moving without a false note of sentimentality. It's deity poems are magnificent.