In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Page 30 American Book Review FROM OUR OWN We wanted to find America through the gasps of snow that fell like last century’s angels. —Kevin Prufer With these lines, Kevin Prufer joins a tradition of America singing that in the work of nineteenthand twentieth-centuries bards such as Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Ted Hughes, and Allen Ginsberg has been celebratory and lyric in its song of an America vast and intimate and brave. It is a tradition, that though it has sometimes naively stumbled on its own path of guileless praise, nevertheless has had as its end the poet’s shameless claim on his earned place in it. Prufer’s complex and utterly beautiful National Anthem haunts and proclaims in subtle ways that recover the possibility of the American epic for a millennial and skeptical generation. Part 1 continues a theme Prufer explored more transparently in Fallen From a Chariot (2005): the fall of Rome as allegory for late imperialist/capitalist America. Here is an America where the pastoral blush of flowers has been replaced with parachute’s silent bloom; where the comfort of religion in the person of the pastor is juxtaposed with the violence of assassination; where the faded military glory of the Caesars, octogenarians who dodder in their hospital and “dream / of Rome. Gone, the snow. Gone, the stutter and the aged gait”; whereAncient Rome itself has been personified, infantilized, and impotent, so that the traveler finds it, “…curled on a pew, asleep. // Someone had dressed you in rags and old columns. / Someone had covered you with yesterday’s news.” Other pasts are suggested as well, most beautifully, theAmerican West, boyish as a young Walt Whitman loafing on the grass and who …slept on an open raft. His chest was brown and flecked with hair. Hat tipped forward to cover the eyes, one hand limp, cutting the water, the other draped over the thigh, touching the thigh. But rather than a new Eden, we are at the end of the history and nuclear bomb testing in the desert: One day the sky was blue as an eye pinned up. Then the flash and rush of wind, the talk that rose and split, and petals, gray and black. And lush. Part 1 suggests the journey of an indeterminate companion, “you” accompanying the speaker’s “I” through a sterile landscape of menace and alienation, even in postures of intimacy: “Beside a broken lamppost , you smiled. Such sharp teeth. We were always hungry then.” Their pairing seems to be one of protector and dependent, perhaps lover and beloved, in any case enabling survivors who navigate a recognizable , but strange landscape—most often suburban and Midwest—where the ghosts of prior empires, Czarist Russia, fallen Rome, mingle with our contemporary dreams of empire and the nightmares of soldiers at war. But the time of this apocalypse is not clear, except that “Around that time, the city grew quiet” and “Those days, the TVs stopped bothering us.” Certainly, it is a recent past of “Super 8, Waffle House, Motel 6” and from the title poem, of “Olive Garden and Exxon: Bed, Bath & Beyond, the stars that throw their/dimes around us all.” National Anthem haunts and proclaims in subtle ways that recover the possibility of the American epic for a millennial and skeptical generation. This is not poetry, however, that leans on popculture references in any of the conventional ways— whether for the disruptive value it can provide the surface in L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry or the particular allusive density that gives stand-up poetry its body, its digressive and democratic jangle.And in fact, the examples above are nearly the sum total of specific, topical references in the book. Automobiles and TVs (and metaphorically, “screens”—in the skull, behind the eyes, the lit windows of houses at night) gain allegorical weight through the course of the book, and certainly there is a kind of self-awareness in some of the poems. In one of the several poems that personify Empire, generally to infantilize it, the speaker declares: “It sat on the rocking chair, looking sincerely at the clock until I gave it...

pdf

Share