Customer Reviews

Sea Smoke

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The writers and critics who love Louis Jenkins' poems usually don't start out by saying that they are tremendously entertaining. They are. I've heard Jenkins give readings where the audience responded to him as to a stand-up comic. But the glint of humor that is present in almost every one of his prose poems shines out of his thoughtful and sometimes dark enjoyment of life.

Sea Smoke is a fine new collection of his prose poems. Take the poem "Popples." Here in Minnesota, where Louis Jenkins lives, popples, or "poplars," or "aspen," are trees as common as weeds, and we forget to look at them. Jenkins looks and listens, with a little smile: "Popples are excitable, quivering all over at the slightest hint of a breeze, full of stupid chatter, gossip, rumor, and innuendo." And he takes off from there, his impressions getting a little more bizarre: "The proletarian tree, growing, optimistic, got the kids all working, grandkids on the way."

But the comic view might miss the beauty of the popples, and Louis Jenkins doesn't: "Popples are lovely in fall when the leaves turn yellow and gold, or in winter with a new moon caught in the branches, and in spring when the rain enhances the delicate grey-green color of the bark. I wouldn't mind a view like this when I come to the bottom of the slide into old age and senility: a stand of popples judiciously framed by the bedroom window to exclude the junk car and the trash cans just to the right."

If you're curious about why Robert Bly said of Louis Jenkins, "Every generation has eight or ten good poets, and he is one of those in his generation," and why Garrison Keillor keeps bringing him back to read his poems on A Prairie Home Companion, and why one of the foremost literary critics in the U.S., Sven Birkerts, has extolled Sea Smoke and loves, as I do, the "elusive alternation of comedy and pathos" in the poems, read this book.

Bill Booth

Louis Jenkins is a wonderful prose/poet and Sea Smoke, in my opinion is one of his best books. If you like reading about everyday life in detail that will have you nodding in agreement, then read this book. He captures each moment perfectly and very often with humour and/or irony.

My only grouse is that his books are not available in England, but thanks to Amazon I get them from the USA site.

I first heard a Louis Jenkins poem earlier this year while listening to Mark Rylance's narration of "Walking Though A Wall" at this year's Tony Awards, which led to my seeking out this book, which doesn't contain the above poem. "Walking" can be experienced again on youtube so I was OK with that as I wanted to find more.

Jenkins' free flowing gently self deprecating word poems,are usually typeset as a single paragraph abandoning the common practice of using line breaks and spacings in a poem to delineate the pace. They are best read aloud to feel the rhythm.

These are poems of whimsical ideas. The first, "Imaginary Reader", tasks us with considering the relationship between the poet and reader, what each imagines the other might be and might demand of each other. Perhaps the reader is a beautiful woman, perhaps it is God. "Retirement" has the author musing about giving up the "lucrative" word poem business. ;-)

Several strong poems play upon with the mundane - a sign "free lawn mower" has him wonder what freedom would really mean for a lawn mower; a fisherman apologizes to his lure for casting it out into the world, all the while reassuring it that he intends to bring home safely. Some break the fourth wall in literature: In "Sleeping Beauty" he wonders about the 100 year age difference between the Prince and his wife, and what of the multi-generational difference between the in-laws; In "Fictional Character" a well written antagonist in a mystery balks at murder and wonders at his motivation. Still others play with metaphors: Can "Sublimation" explain why everything seems to get smaller with age; In "Body and Soul" - if the body is the home of the soul then perhaps it is a motor home and the soul is a really bad driver.

As with any collection there are hits and misses, but Jenkins' does much much better than average and his wry observations make this a worthwhile read.