Three ‘Song Languages’
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If you’ve ever heard Michael Klein’s speaking voice, you know it’s one of a kind, with elements of growl and rasp, the arc of thought suspended momentarily while Klein laughs reflexively at some absurdity shared with the listener. “Say, the Voice,” from Klein’s first book, 1990, concludes: “I remember when I became my voice/ & tried to make its life/ & my life mean one thing.” Reading The Early Minutes of Without, a generous collection of three decades of Klein’s poetry, one can see how here, too, meaning is embodied in sound, fusing with it in long cadences as lines extend and turn under the pressure of thoughts and feelings. I trust these poems for the way they trust us with Klein’s intimate, direct utterances, the intensity of his passion, the deep seeing he wants to share.

            Many souls come to life in these poems—lovers, family, alcoholics, poets, friends. “The Twin,” from then, we were still living, physicalizes the complexity of the poet’s grief for his brother in a few telling details: “I carried the effect of him/ afterwards down some coiling stairs into the streets/ of Boston—music, garments, literature, some beauty stuff.” Those “coiling stairs” read like the building’s viscera; and within them the poet carries truths coiled within his body into the world.

     Good artists know that there’s power in limiting one’s options, but Klein also knows when to take off the restraints and sweep us up in a crescendo of praise. Among poems asserting gratitude for closeness to animals, “Swale,” the prose poem that ends the book, sings homage to the great racehorse Klein served as groom, asserting that “nothing has given me more life than watching that big black beautiful shining soul run through the animal line & past all comprehension into the music of his speed & win. … Here’s to Swale & to others of his kind, creature of my joy & of my sorrow.”

There are no dull moments or wasted words in Christopher Soden’s captivating third full-length collection, Tempting God. He knows how to skip the on-ramp, take us straight to the place of conflict, and shine his light on situations that kidnap our hearts. It’s no surprise to learn of Soden’s long association with the lively Dallas theater scene. He’s an astute critic, a writer of plays and performance pieces, and an award-winning presenter of solo work. Soden’s pacing is dramatic as lines move seamlessly within and against loose verse structures. Succinct, clear, colloquial American speech, uttered with Soden’s wild verve, ensures readers’ identification with their own lives.

            The poems in Tempting God, small marvels of lyric narrative, take us on a tour of queer encounters, beginning with the life-changing, unabashed delight of a first erotic experience with another boy. Sex—offered or withheld, soul-stirring or repellent—serves these poems as a lens, a language, a catalyst. Soden has an outsider’s keen eye and gift for appreciating the nonconforming and unexpected, and the speaker’s quiet victory in becoming himself is implicit in compassionate portraits of others who resist easy categorization.

            Soden is a marvelous poet whose books deserve more attention than they’ve received. I love the generous spirit that flows through Tempting God, above all in the compelling self-portrait that emerges, of one who experiences mercy and a kind of grace in surrendering to life over and over. In the last words of the title poem: “How could I not?/ How could I not?”

In Tony Leuzzi’s fourth book of poems, Fog Notes, mystery and clarity go hand in hand. What does language know of our dreams and figments and flashes of clear seeing? These are poems of rare freshness: nothing in them is predictable. Images are precise, vivid, immediate.

            From “Urban Haiku”: “Trophy from tonight’s wet amble:/ dented vinyl infant head. Its blue/ undaunted eyes alert/ in trammeled pachysandra.” Such images enter us with the weight of their presence. But the poems offer no answers, explanations, or wrap-ups. Elegant, spare, unembellished, some with elliptical leaps within and between lines, these are not erasure poems; there are no tricks or clever evasions, no hidden essays, no ads for the emotions. They are more query than certainty. Amid sly jokes, dreams, enigmas, and notes on the misdirection of particular words and ideas, runs a thread of loss. Some of these poems end with a dash, a question mark, an ellipsis, or no punctuation at all, but even those that close with a period seem to leave the poem open, refusing forced solutions—as if still vibrating at the frequency they have caused us to hear.

            Leuzzi’s notes at the end of the book are generous in sharing part of his playful compositional process, which includes his invention of “diminishing sonnets,” his invitation to friends to send him random numbers which became the basis for syllabic patterns, and poems formed from mondegreens, the words we make mishearing familiar texts recited by rote. Despite the rigor behind the poems’ structures, their language and syntax seem spontaneous and speakable—Yeats’ dictum that a line of poetry should “seem a moment’s thought” comes to mind. Nothing in these poems is overwrought or strained.

            I didn’t know how much I craved this book before I’d read it. It will stay with me, like the body in Leuzzi’s poem “Fog Machine”: “The body’s edges are/ erased/ reconstructed   once the smoke has cleared.”