Green Sees Things in Waves

Rating:
Summary: Kleinzahler's masterpiece
Review: With this book, August Kleinzahler -- already one of those fascinating poets who makes you glad that you live in the present moment -- has given us a strong, strange, unique and utterly memorable collection of poems. In poems like "Snow in New Jersey" and "Uttar Pradesh" he combines the textures and techniques of a short story writer with the roving eye of a documentary film-maker using a hand-held camera that allows him to venture anywhere and everywhere, with the result that the reader never knows where he is going next. There is more of a concern here with language in itself, that is, language considered as more than a mere medium of representation, than in his previous work (see "52 Pick-up"); yet at the same time, the new poems show more narrative and a greater facility for following complex, often associative patterns of thought. Best of all are the surprises -- to take just one (although admittedly my favorite) example, the twelfth line of "The Dog Stoltz," which practically knocked me off my feet. Kleinzahler's new poems are so contemporary, so accurate, so detailed, and so relevant that they put the front page of the New York Times to shame.