If I Settle Down...: Poems Kindle Edition

I absolutely loved this book. His ability to conjure extremely vivid mental images is incredible. With each poem the raw emotion is conveyed so completely that I could feel it myself. My favorites were "To Our Teachers", "Apology", "Never-Never Land", "Pecan Pie", and "Jailbird Cigarettes". I cannot decide amongst them. I would recommend this book to anyone that likes poetry.

Tennessee poet Charles Cross makes an impressive debut with this first publication IF I SETTLE DOWN…POEMS. The poems give evidence of a man whose distance from society gives vantage to musing about the quandaries of history, mythology, the social diseases of the present, a yearning for connection that at the same time feels comfortably distant at present. This is the kind of poetry that comes form a mind that likely will age well as he publishes more. At times he pays too much attention to rhyme and overlooks soul, yet at other times his mediating observations are so keenly on target that the style of writing is unnoticed. Some examples follow – a variety to sample:

Apology

Meant to sing you a song, but dabbled
With Sleep, till he took my eyes, ears
And mouth to places off-chart,
Where voices heard not but the hum of my heart.

Tuva Street Song to America – (a few excerpts)

First note floats the vortex west to east coast
Through Trump fantasies and tall credit babes
To the retail prophet.
Praise to Armani! Praise to Hilfiger!…

Casino gods and oil-slick Hollywood producers
Stimulate retirees, young sailors and prostitutes
Beat the blood of this nation for a fat stack of moving cash….

Meth cooks are never unemployed,
Yet draw unemployment
Laughing down the hill through the smokestacks.

Dried-up cactus girls flaunt seeking street corners;
Painters and lawyers stop by,
Lifting the head, and squinting the eye.

Lascivious

A-cast about sea-many beauties of skin,
A-breasted cream eloping Man,
Beasting burden unto burdenless minds:
A hillock for nymphs, ancient and without
Age clothing ephemeral magnetism.
A-splendid naturale!
Our duties aspire to ash among the fire-
Breathing thought of possibility, a-mixed
In the drunken tossy-turny of trial’n’error.

But for this reader this short poem indicates that the future is likely very bright as Charles Cross polishes his art;

Of T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland…

I read your rough draft.
I won’t let it go to waste.
Your truth means nothing,
Less I learn your mistakes.

Watching this young poet grow with what likely will be a growing audience will be anticipation worthy of consideration. Grady Harp, August 15

As always, do not let my star count override your judgement of content. More on the stars, counting, and my rating challenges later.

The opening poem, If I Settle Down, is quite nice and fairly straightforward. However, many of these poems are complex, and often include social commentary. For one example, in Tuva Street Song for America, we find this: “Cigarette smoke soars from the lusty camel and his lusty bride /Into the lusty movies and magazines, /Into the lusty mouths of cool.”

Such complexity rewards rereading. Sam the Snail’s Simple Confession, and To Our Teachers, are examples of this.

If you’re looking for something simple and touching, find To the Old Coonhound. Conversely for complexity, turn to If Christ Had a Face Like Ingrid Bergman. I’m not absolutely clear on this one after a couple of re-readings.

As always, if you don’t know what something is, Google it. There are many references in Cross’s work.

As a ‘spoiler’, here is the entire short poem The Power: “I desire to possess the power of Pablo /And Yeats, to act on a whim; /And at old age, I’ll return to my youthful skin, /And live with more memories /Than the memories I live within.”

If you’re looking for hints of sex, turn to Pecan Pie. For personal experience, in Cinders we find this: “My senses turn to ash along with feeling good about myself, /And not a single cinder from the fire /Breathes in my every day.”

A favourite here is The Right Hand. Although complex, it yields a story of integrity corrupted by ‘the tyger.’ Another interesting poem, Nottingham’s Ghost, is bitter social commentary.

Even the small poem Meditation has layers and rewards rereading.

Finally, Cross gives us the prose poem Joyous Occasion, where we find lines like this: “Thomas ignored the group. The television ran a commercial set about pills for depression, make-up, and cat food. An old man holler'd cross the hall, “Hello! Hello! Ma'am? Sir? Somebody?” The soldiers of scrubs marched to and fro, taking orders, giving orders, prescribing orders to fend off the enemy at the gates: sentimentality.” This small quote cannot give you the overall power of this piece, which ends thus: “The brothers and sisters circled the doctor in frenzy; they hit him with human emotion: his aged enemy. Thomas watched, from above, his sleeping angel; and without hesitation, he kissed the air she breathed so sweet, and left with the belief that he inherited the goodness of her heart, so it would never stop a beat.”

All that said, how do I come up with four stars? My personal guidelines, when doing an ‘official’ KBR review, are as follows: five stars means, roughly equal to best in genre. Rarely given. Four stars means, extremely good. Three stars means, definitely recommendable. I am a tough reviewer. I try hard to be consistent. If you are patient and enjoy the complexity, your rating may well be higher than mine. Four stars from me, and clearly recommended.

Kindle Book Review Team member.
(Note: this reviewer received a free copy of this book for an independent review. He is not associated with the author or Amazon.)

I am not experienced in poetry, but I did find myself engrossed and captivated by this collection of poems and I read them all in one sitting. It was like a series of short stories told very articulately. My favourites were Sal the Snail’s Simple Confession and the short tale at the end of the book called Joyous Occasion. The author has a natural storytelling ability which he harnesses into a collection of words which perfectly fit and deliver his messages in style. This book would make an ideal gift to poetry lovers. Highly recommended.