Customer Reviews

Reading The Water (Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize)

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

 

 

Probably one of the best and most clever books of poetry written in the last ten years. Webb is a member of the "stand-up" school of West Coast poetry, a movement that seeks to inject comedy and surprise into the otherwise staid and dull world of poetry. He's Billy Collins, but with a much darker--and smarter--edge.

I found this one in the Dartmouth Bookstore Basement for $1 and what with it being National Poetry Month (April) and the cover blurb declaring it the winner of the 1997 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize (no I've never heard of it either), I figured I'd give it a shot. It was four quarters well spent.

Using traditional poetry forms and the incidents of everyday life, Webb crafts some really witty and wonderful little poems. Whether he's writing about a Cristo art project (Umbrellas) or The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Twenty Years Too Late to See The Rocky Horror...), he uncovers the amazing in the mundane. Several have a pretty sharp edge to them, like Prayer for the Man Who Mugged My Father, 72--suffice it to say, the mugger hopes the prayer doesn't come to pass. And a couple are just really funny, like Broken Toe, where the title occurrence at least snaps him out of his middle aged complacency. And I found one image that for me really captures what poetry can do at its best, the clever use of words to paint an indelible image. It's from the poem Spiders:

Their webs, transparent fielders' gloves,
pluck flies out of mid-air.

The baseball analogy alone is enough to get my attention, but the play on the word flies exemplifies the cleverness on display throughout this collection.

The poems of Charles Harper Webb are well worth checking out. I found a bunch of his poems on-line and linked to them below--give them a try and if you see the book for $1, grab it.

GRADE: A

Accessible. The more he resembles Billy Collins the more I like him. (He's very like Billy Collins!) Best are the one about the carnivorous Chain of Being (4get title) and (?)Death Race, which is kinda similar. The last dozen poems were familiar - did Webb put all his favourites at the rear and then hive them off for a selected that I've read & forgotten about? Unless he had a whole bunch in that Seriously Funny anthology, which is - what it says on the tin. But my two faves are serious. Well, funny/serious - it's funny that we take things so seriously. Except when it's your face that gets pushed in. So, almost a five - I'll save that for the selected, but I've got that pesky Tulip Farms one someplace - if I could just lay my hands on it..

I was in the middle of reading this book of poems and accidentally left it on a plane. Suffice it to say that I couldn't rest until I secured another copy. Really, it's that good. I couldn't say it better than Edward Hirsch who wrote the introduction to this compilation, "Charles Harper Webb has a wild inventive energy, a quirky, at times even manic wit, and a deep sense of wonder at the world"... "As a poet, he's a wiseacre, a trouble maker - part stand up comic, part anthropologist, part visionary."