Blood
& Roses: Dan Gutstein's new work “occupies” poetry
Perhaps it's that ubiquitous word of the last six months: occupy, that makes me view
Dan Gutstein's newest work of poetry, Bloodcoal & Honey,
as a piece of architecture, a living one that occupies imainative and
emotional space. Or perhaps it's Eric Grienke's perspective on how
poetry should evolve, still fresh in my mind (see my review of his
work in the last BKR), that BC&Honey manages
to landscape experience, firmly grounded in emotional places.
Gutstein's poems take various forms and create a physical and
abstract space for our imaginations to wander.
His poems occupy space.
It's a feeling, mind
you, when you find a poet who tells stories without giving away any
ending, or cause. BC&Honey's language is precise “I
crouch on the edge of the wheat/as the wind doubles back” as it is
visceral “gun clatter off brick./ I followed blood clots behind a
dumpster....” and his elegies for the mysterious Warren lay a
foundation for the book, which later sections return to and rip from,
like brickwork detail, or a bit of accent color unifying the poems as
a whole.
It's no secret that I
equate poetry to record albums, and dusty indie finds that pieced
together my adolescence, and Bloodcoal & Honey reminds me
of dark moody European post punk album, or at the very least a place
where one might hear such a record, playing in a dark but cozy cafe
or pub. And to a degree, BCH is that, dissonance &
lyric, narrative & elliptical, sipping coffee, or stout, a lone
cigarette smoker near by.
But it's bigger and
warmer than hipster cool, in section III, Gutstein looks his family
in the eye, and captures generations of small moments that like black
and white photos, capture an innocence and danger; tension between
light and dark.
I like the narrative
without constraint, the elegiac compositions that features repeating
whispering personaes, abstractions, tension of lines placed against
jarring lines, such as in “What Can Disappear” the subject of a
conversation about structure and form written with long Whitmanesque
lines that make the poem an visual ironic statement on form.
Gutstein's work is
composed, and controlled, the tension between loss and love like a
sharp corner; a building with two doors, on opposite sides, each
leading to a brownstone's worth of damp rooms and cozy places.
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