Customer Reviews

The Underflower

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

 

 

The poetic talents of Jay Snodgrass are clearly documented in this highly recommended collection of his work that aptly displays his unique and distinctive visions concerning the relationships between the mundane and the spiritual. 'Crawling Growth': Sealed like a love letter/And visibly desperate, you may not/Leave this place, Insect-Sun, in an envelope,/Nor scorn the gifts/Of my higher head, its/Murky sewer laser-beamed/With love and strewn with chewed up/Carnations. These exposed crocus beds/Are a rhizomatic perversion,/The grass handlers gift of/Heavy ropes and highway:/I only hear this now/Because of the infiltrating breeze's/Turned-down gift of righteous flesh.

Between titles that make one exclaim out loud, "Rats, why didn't I think of that!"(eg "Pumphead," "Apoca-Psalm," "Dropped Hammer," "Galactic Speed Dial") to end lines, which emerge surprisingly but organically, the poems in Jay Snodgrass's second collection, "The Underflower" do back flips.

Sometimes he tells the reader what to do: "Mix water with eye movement / make sleeping figures shake to the withdrawal of state / sponsored desire." Other times he tells us what he is going to do to us, "I will kiss you when there is nothing left / to kiss but concrete lips and gravel / whispers." But whatever rhetorical mode he is working in, Snodgrass gives us poems that sing post-metal apocalyptic hallelujahs on the page.

If you dig Paul Celan and John Ashbery and Berryman (and even if you don't), you'll love these poems.