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This debut collection comes garlanded with praise and has
already won awards in America, where Boss has been marked for future poetry
stardom. My sceptical hackles bristled, but this really is an ambitious,
highly coherent book, likely to make a big impact; it's also extremely
enjoyable to read and savour.
Boss's specialty is the short-lined poem, an attenuated, spinal column full
of internal rhyme and creative use of syntax, allied to Midwestern speech
tones: 'We had Kris Kristofferson's / Me and Bobby Mcgee / in vinyl' one
poem, 'Inventory', begins then half-rhymes 'vinyl' with 'vegetable' as it
goes its unhurried way; 'The day is grey and the lake / shifts, mercurial, /
like modelling clay', another landscape begins. Other poems take the form of
amusing shaggy-dog narratives ('She Rings Me Up', an encounter in a
supermarket checkout queue) and several poems about growing up on a Wisconsin
farm, carefully patterned to bring out the grain of lives lived slowly. The
title poem begins, fittingly on Boss's father's farm, a place of 'thickets
choked / with tractor parts / and bedcoil' and successive poems widen out the context as they
describe the hard agricultural lives of family members in a way not too
dissimilar to Lowell's Life Studies, but without the manic edge. In four
brief stanzas, for instance, he
conjures up the entire world of his grandparents' card-games ('Blessed with
Trump and Wild') using a familiar images of card-suits with ease and
sensitivity.
This is also, as stated earlier, a highly-patterned book: Larkin, who would
have hated it in many ways, used to agonise over the running order of poems
in order to carefully structure his collections and Boss has also thought
carefully about this. The book is split into six sections and there are
chronological patterns: the boy who recalls listening to gramophone records
and resolving 'I too would be / a narrator some day' eventually narrates
tales of his own son and his marriage in Sections V and VI. The middle parts,
Sections III and IV, much of which seems to cover a marital breakdown and
temporary separation, are the least impressive, though there are fine
individual lyrics, such as 'She Rings Me Up', as noted above.
Boss is at his best when exploring the slow lives of relatives or simply
having fun with words: 'The Day Un-Dims', 'Icicles', 'The Deeper the
Dictionary', 'More So' - some of these carry a concentrated look at the
implements of poetry (words, as W.S.Graham reminded us), punning titles
gradually reeling you in, convoluted syntax only occasionally becoming a
dance too dense a la Hopkins (for example 'How Smokes the Smolder'). Despite
these slight flaws, the whole tenor of Boss's poetry is accessible and
subtle, repaying rereading: one wonders how he will follow such an impressive
debut?
© Martin
Caseley 2010
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