Open Between Us (review)

If you google George Looney, you'll be asked if you meant to google George Clooney.

I would love to hear George the Actor read poems from George the Poet's latest collection, Open Between Us. Pre Up in the Air, Clooney wouldn't have possessed the maturity of tone to carry off this duty. Now he's ready. Poems on cd, anyone?

Looney's poems are dense, somber, contemplative. More important, they're the poems of someone who has lived with his eyes wide open, someone who, like most of us, isn't given a map to navigate life but must bushwhack his way toward where he's going. There are pleasures along the way. There is also pain and sadness. With luck, there's wisdom. There's certainly wisdom in Looney's work.

The enlightened Clooney at the end of Up in the Air, his heart broken, his lifestyle exposed as vacant, would know how to read Looney's "The Worst We Can Do," which is a love poem to love itself. But it isn't love as romantic inspiration or love as pseudonym for sex. It's love as an endurance test, a marathon of the heart. The speaker's father is shown coming home drunk and falling asleep in front of the television. The mother copes as best she can, sometimes leaving him to sleep in his chair, sometimes waking him and urging him upstairs to bed.

It hurt her, and I couldn't understand howshe could limp through such painand still love him. But she did.

If love is true, the poem concludes, it "makes it through the worst we can do to it." Love isn't a conqueror, it's a survivor.

Looney's collection is filled with such insights. Whereas younger poets—or, anyway, poets who haven't reconciled what they hope life is versus what it actually is—might be tempted to flavor the themes Looney addresses with grand observations and stirring epiphanies, Looney is content to allow his work a quieter wisdom.

Take, for example, the collection's opening poem, "How It All Is." Read out of context, the concluding stanza might seem grandiose:

How predictable this sore world can be.Always take as much of it inas you can, my friend, to love.

But what comes before offers no fireworks. It is honest in its understatement, its adherence to the way life, in most instances, is lived: quietly. But if consolation is sometimes small, at least it's present:

A woman practices the celloacross the courtyard. Sometimesat night I watch her feed her cat.

It's a comfort to know something,at least, is well cared for.

Coupled with its quiet prelude, the ending of "How It All Is" isn't grandiose at all. It is merely the inevitable conclusion to what precedes it. The advice it offers, one imagines, isn't intended to be blared to a large audience but to be whispered to a companion.

In Open Between Us, Looney pays homage to his poetic heroes, especially James Wright and Richard Hugo. It isn't hard to see the influence of both poets on Looney's writing in this and his other work. (Looney's previous books of poetry are The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels, Attendant Ghosts, and Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh. He is also the author of the novella Hymn of Ash. All of his books have won awards.) Certainly Looney's unsentimental gaze is akin to Wright's, whose "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" could easily have inspired a dozen of the poems in Open Between Us, in tone if not in subject.

It's hard not to admire a poet who not only admits to his influences but highlights them. Looney dedicates the book's sixth poem, "Into the River You Lost," to Wright. The poem opens "It was pain that moved you to speak of the river …" (Wright, of course, wrote about rivers the way Bessie Smith sang the blues...