The Bunker in the Parsley Fields by Gary Gildner (review)

B o o k R e v ie w s the French Revolution itself, concluding that “The mind, like the heart / in its cavity / leans slightly left.” O f all the poignant scenes in this part of the book, my favorite is in “Postcards of London.” The speaker observes in Victoria Station a woman who “picks food out of the dustbin / and is taste­ less enough / to eat it in front of our children.” Here Almon confronts oth­ erness directly, minding the gap between the Canadian tourist and the homeless of London. A s Almon mentions in the book’s title poem, “the oddest gaps are in language.” He uses travel to distinguish ways of seeing and saying, tuning a poet’s ear to his own experience of difference. The second half of the book, “Postmodern Times,” cuts a wider swath through contemporary existence. The majority of the strongest poems in this section deal with old age, disease, decay, and loss. In “Visiting Hour” Almon sees illness and death as dehumanized by politics and economics: “This is death by disinfectant and medicare / this is death by profit mar­ gins.” In “Olga’s Hydrangeas,” though, he sees poignancy where most wouldn’t: Olga falls down a flight of stairs, and her bruises are likened to hydrangeas because “as you step into the shower / . . . they turn colour / after they bloom.” W hile A lm on’s poems in this volume are mostly clean-spoken narra­ tives of travel, love, and loss, he does display his characteristic penchant for finding the poetic in the mundane: in “Spicy Bits . . .” he summarizes the soap opera-ish details of a biography of Holman Hunt, complete with page numbers, and “Com plaint to Miles Francis Stapleton FitzalanHoward . . is a letter complaining about the tourist mugs at a museum. This poem includes the curator’s curt reply: “I am so glad you visited the Castle and hope you enjoyed it as much as I think your little poem implies.” W hile this passage is drenched in irony, I tend to agree with one part of it: in Mind the Gap, Bert Alm on seems to enjoy the world; he looks at it squarely and in it finds pathos, love, mystery, and most of all, happi­ ness. He leaves us wondering, as he says in “A Critique of Pure Happiness,” “how it is I feel so happy / at the loneliest time, three in the morning / in the loneliest place.” The Bunker in the Parsley Fields. By Gary Gildner. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. 77 pages, $10.95. Reviewed by Mary K. Stillwell University of Nebraska at Omaha The phenomenology of the present often drops away in Gary Gildner’s new collection, The Bunker in the Parsley Fields, to reveal the rich under­ lining of the moment that informs and gives texture to the poet’s life. In W A L 3 3 (1 } SPRING 1 9 9 8 “Jury Duty,” for example, Gildner provides the history of the table at which six lawyers in “sober business suits that fit” “arrange their papers.” He invites us to see the “long finely whorled oak,” the truth of nature, and his own life within nature. In the midst of worry about erosion, a nuthatch’s tracks open Gildner to memories of his grandmother, “Lavina.” Gildner’s collection, which won the Iowa Poetry Prize, accomplishes the paradoxical. W hile these poems allow for the appreciation of the moment, they also accommodate the knowledge of loss. Even as joyful celebrations of life and relationship, poems such as “The Stone,” “C ol­ lecting Cowpies,” and “Song: One Summer Afternoon in the Country” allude to Sisyphus, the circle of nature, the winter that has just passed and will surely come again. Other poems are more direct: mourning father, grandfather, a boyhood friend, the passing of youth when a boy practiced baseball on the cinders in the back alley and took the world into his glove. As Gildner stands amazed at the particularities of his own life, we are enjoined to turn and look more closely at our own. We are, he reminds us, all on “The Trail”; “this walk / we share / and share / again...