The Standing Wave (review)

To create an aural counterpart of that emotion, Murch interwove a series of insect-like clicks with the tiny abrasive sound of sand particles rubbing against each other. In effect, he created a sound that wasn't there to match the emotional tenor of a scene that was itself fiction. In the visual dimension, Murch culls raw footage to obtain the precise frame, revealing a deeper, more complex meaning than either the writer, the actor or the director may have expected. To film the average movie requires twenty-five times the film that is in the final cut. In Apocalypse Now the ratio was a hundred to one. At some point, perhaps on the third take, perhaps on the thirtythird , an actor will blink or inadvertently twist his mouth a certain way whenhe says how muchhe loved his father. Murch will seize that second, giving the audience to understand what the character cannot admit to himself: that in the deepest chamber of his heart, he feels his father was a narcissistic nincompoop. In these dialogues—and they really are two-way discussions—novelist and filmmaker share the understanding that the creative process is completed only when a viewer or reader layers the narrative with his own sensibilities. That critical synapse between the objective story and what the viewer or reader apprehends is the third dimension where magic happens. Given the wide range of topics this bookcovers,itsbiggestweaknessisits organization. Like all conversations, especially those between dynamic individuals, these carom from topic to topic, and some subjects, like The English Patient, come up again and again. While Ondaatje does supply subheads throughout the chapters, their titles are not especially helpful. "Ka-lunk" and "Wideo" aren't useful to a reader who wants to reread a critical point, and unfortunately the page numbers of the subheads aren't on the contents page. These problems aside, The Conversations gives unique insight into a craft that has made us all sit and laugh, cry, cheer and gasp together with a group of strangers in a pitchblack room. Michael Ondaatje lifts the curtain and shows us that movie magic isn't wizardry at all but a perfect blend of consummate skill and creative instinct. (PS) The Standing Wave by Gabriel Spera Perennial, 2003, 96 pp., $12.95 Like the aerialist in the poem of the same title, one of the strongest in this collection, Gabriel Spera tiptoes a fine line, maintaining a balance between formalism and free verse, traditional tropes and verbal originality. When Spera casts his long, clause-riddled sentences into a formal structure, the result is often spectacular. The sentences tumble down through the stanzas like downhill skiers, swerving almost breathtakingly to clip the gate of each rhyme: "And he would be lured, surely, by the trucks/plowing like mollusks/down the glistening freeways, the half-crown/of islands that pacify the harbor, where yawls/ anchored off the yacht club docks, like minnows/browsing, nose/the coming currents with their sleek bright hulls/all schooled and aligned." Spera is constantly complicating his images, adding metaphor upon The Missouri Review · 185 metaphor, as in this description of olive picking: "My hand's small tongues grow blacker/in swallowing the dark fruit/dangling like gems of tar or/opulent mussels clustered/to some sea beast's restless/green and silvered mane." The result is a desire to crawl back through the poems and start to unpack them, even as the verbal energy thrusts us forward. These poems do not rely on form alone for their power. Spera, whose book was selected by Dave Smith as one of this year's winners of the National Poetry Series, has absorbed a wide range of influences. The first part of the book is rich with meditations on the natural world, such as "Tarantula," in which the poet invokes Frost while observing a group of boys tormenting a spider: "They are not humbled/by the flawless machinery of its form,/. . . still they fling their crooked stick/to the far weeds and crouch in silence as it/sidles back to the dark that gave it shape." Later Spera turns to the industrial world, with poems that recall, in both their single...