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BOOK REVIEWS Of Heroin, Epics, and Bears Laura Wright The Book of Jon Eleni Sikelianos City Lights http://www.citylights.com 127 pages; paper, $11.95 The California Poem Eleni Sikelianos Coffee House Press http://www.coffeehousepress.org 196 pages; paper, $16.00 Sadness has a rhythm, loss, a tempo and a timbre. It is these, the rhythm, the speed, the lilt and pitch, rather than the description or the story, that Eleni Sikelianos's Book ofJon tells, or rather, reenacts. In so doing, she walks a tightrope between the maudlin and the disaffected, and she emerges triumphant. It is risky to write about the potentially sensational . The subject itself tends to overshadow the writing, tends to leave little room for anything save titillation (read: shock and awe) or that practiced blasé tone that risks alienation. In the same vein, personal loss is often a touchy matter, having the tendency to overpower the writer, to obscure all but the most blatant and bland tropes. When John Ashbery wrote Flow Chart (1991) in response to his mother's death, he skirted the subject, never directly referring to his particular anguish. In Ashbery's case, the diversion from the object of despair was a successful means of avoiding sentimentality and triteness. In The Book ofJon, however, Eleni Sikelianos breaks all of these unwritten rules and addresses the death of her father directly and compellingly , with a subtlety and grace that is nothing less than stunning. Sikelianos has whatever "W is; call it a knack, a way, or, "the touch." The Book of Jon is a poem in the form of a memoir, a tragedy in the form of gradual revelation, a tale in the form of a nightmare from which you are not allowed to wake. It is a book ofrare beauty, an elegy comprised ofaffirmation, illustration, divination, and pure loss. This is the story of the life and death of Sikelianos's father Jon, of his incapacities, his absences, his moments of brilliance, and his failure, ultimately, in his struggles with heroin and alcohol. And this is the story ofSikelianos, poet and daughter, living and observing her father's world while not always being a part of his world, chronicling with magic pen and tongue, and with devastating accuracy, the worldly ins and outs. The BookofJon lurches eloquently from history to dream, interspersed with photos and fragments; time is fluid, possibility cut short. "When you are a drowning man, you need things that float. How can I explain this? For some people, all the objects of the world lose buoyancy; they pull you down." This is not a complaint. It is an elegy. Few writers have the capacity to encompass this fluidity ofgenre (Michael Ondaatje comes to mind as among these few), a fluidity in which poems, narrative, photographs, dreams, lists, and film treatments weave together to create an astonishing whole: "Gravity has new rules. Acoffee cup is like a sinking freighter in your hand." Throughout, we are given to understand that Jon is already dead, yet the ideas of Jon, the possibilities of Jon, are myriad: In Dante's conception ofthe world, we see only a sliver of ourselves here on Earth; the rest of it is ghostly or heavenly, haunting us. Or we are ghosts here on earth, shadows of our full selves. Only when we bust free of this world can we find the one hundred percent. For these 127 pages>-Sikelianos busts free of the world and its cloying limitations to create a "one hundred percent " painfully brilliant tribute. In The California Poem it sometimes seems that Sikelianos wishes to encompass the entire state. California is a big state, and this is a big poem, but it bursts its seams with its attempts to be that vast. Sikelianos strives for impossible largeness and, at times, almost attains it. But ultimately The California Poem falls short of its own efforts due to its sheer ambition. Both its title and its structure invite comparison to William Carlos Williams's Paterson (1963), the quintessential place-bound long poem, but Sikelianos's California does not manage the same unification of variousness or the sense of immersion in place, in history, in...

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