Customer Reviews

Totem (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize)

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I was fortunate enough to meet Gregory Pardlo tonight at a reading at the College of St.Rose in Albany, NY. He is as personable as he is brilliant. His smooth melodic voice will resonate for me as I read the rest of his pieces from Totem. I couldn't resist the purchase after hearing him aloud this evening. I literally shook my head in wonder and my jaw dropped in awe after his poem "Double Dutch." If you purchase this, which you definately should--if you enjoy poetry and all things literarily devine--go straight to page 36. Enough good things can not be said about this book!

Pardlo has an inimitable style, language--he cannot be classified. Not that any genuine poet can--but Pardlo for example would be particularly difficult to parody. Brenda Hillman in her Introduction tries to cast a net over him: "[Pardlo's] work brings together philosophical musings, abstract thought, rhetorical heightened diction, odd metaphors, and intense emotional utterance".

For this African American poet presently teaching at CUNY, the title "Totem" is "a word, an idea, a figure [of] two syllables [emblematic] of the poet's spiritual origins. It also connotes a shared guardian nature a family might hold in common; it is a symbol that draws the individual into collective consciousness." [also from Hillman's Preface] In Pardlo's more complex poems, one does find the dualisms of struggle and surrender, conflict and serenity, concern and hope, wandering and revelation.

"What odds/do those birds stand to chances anyway?/Prevention is akin to greed. Say recovery/and a sermon salts the air.../Jersey's domed capitol looks like a junkyard/of Church bells/a reliquary of Sundays/wracked and laid to rest...Another prays the next wet pebble/be the one that makes a beach./Paydirt. We should be so lucky." [from Atlantic City Sunday Morning] The heterogeneity of objects, images, and language of Pardlo's poems is more than inventory, discursiveness, or observation. He sees the earth will be redeemed in its entirety or not at all.