American Linden

Rating:
Summary: A mobile language
Review: Matthew Zapruder's American Linden is a sometimes surreal, often funny, always genuinely expressed book of linguistic constellations. He mentions Spanish and Greek and logic, Tagalog and tunes and melody, birdsong and currencies, and he writes "I am guilty of secret constellations." Yet these constellations are not altogether secret, but rather playfully at play, put into motion like a wonderful mobile alternately inducing delight, clash, harmony, distracted thoughtfulness, etc. The pieces of the mobile, dangling as if from thin metal ligatures, are clouds and golems, farms and days, foreign currency and flowers and breasts and noon, and they assemble and reassemble in shifting clustered galaxies that I thoroughly enjoyed gazing at, stumbling across, chuckling over.

It is a book made of inventive and continuous, quirky and comedic, unrolling threads of metaphor, many surprising but sensible as the cat whose "mother was a sofa, a whole/ neighborhood of comfort, support,/ understanding..." In this, and in many creative reversals and convergences, he causes elements to flow into one another, creating an odd, complex, (but not dissonant or off-putting) amalgam of yet almost intuitive experience-"when that ten AM birdfeeder skylight/ perfectly lifted/ from morning hour/ halted a moment beyond my fingertips/ to perch half still/ and three quarters in motion/ a sketch of a hummingbird..." He understands the magician's and the comedian's craft of the set up, the teasing of expectation, the timing of delivery, the slip into an unforeseen magnificence of surprise. But here it is without the magician's grandiloquent drama- this is a book and a craft and a language not caught up with or in itself but rather generous, comic, and sometimes, idiosyncratically resplendent.

Rating:
Summary: GENTLE GIANT
Review: This book has undeniable power and is in no way soft. Misreading it as soft or non-threatening only reveals one's abject cynicism. These poems delve deeply and honestly right into the center of the speaker's heart and for that reason are often painful, sometimes lighthearted, and always honest. This is a book by the genuine article writing real poems.

Rating:
Summary: A mobile language
Review: Writing about poetry is ludicrous, especially when the poems are written by Matthew Zapruder. The poems in AMERICAN LINDEN are intensely personal, not only in style of placing words on paper, but also in the spectum of ideas that flow through his brain. Many of these gems are about the actual attempt to write poems - aborted starts, frustrated beginnings. But when this poet sets foot outside and allows his kaleidoscopic gaze to pause on barns, birds, memories, imaginings, then his mastery of form and communication sets sail and the results are fresh and scintillating.
It is ludicrous to write about poetry....this poet distills beyond essence ideas that only tap at our imagination. "I try to be a good hillside/my eyesight salty and clear,/and hold still all night. /..../ All the next hours will be empty shelves./ Until I'm a storm,/ and only a flower knows me." I suppose one has to say something in a review: Read these please.

Rating:
Summary: The Joys of First Person Singular
Review: Writing about poetry is ludicrous, especially when the poems are written by Matthew Zapruder. The poems in AMERICAN LINDEN are intensely personal, not only in style of placing words on paper, but also in the spectum of ideas that flow through his brain. Many of these gems are about the actual attempt to write poems - aborted starts, frustrated beginnings. But when this poet sets foot outside and allows his kaleidoscopic gaze to pause on barns, birds, memories, imaginings, then his mastery of form and communication sets sail and the results are fresh and scintillating.
It is ludicrous to write about poetry....this poet distills beyond essence ideas that only tap at our imagination. "I try to be a good hillside/my eyesight salty and clear,/and hold still all night. /..../ All the next hours will be empty shelves./ Until I'm a storm,/ and only a flower knows me." I suppose one has to say something in a review: Read these please.