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POET REVIEWED: |
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Tony Gloeggler / One Wish Left / Roger Sedarat Like so many poems in this collection, "First Bite" delightfully thrusts the reader into the tragedy of time. Here a grandmother, one week before losing the ability to speak and starting to wet herself, meticulously picks and skins an apple. Offering the first bite to her grandson, he eats of a knowledge that he can't escape: the reality of growing older and having to surrender what one once physically possessed. Tony Gloeggler approaches such temporal displacement with ironic enjoyment, replacing Eve with a grandmother while putting himself in the role of Adam. Familial metaphors tinged with erotic flesh tones inform a few of Gloeggler's key poems. These effectively demonstrate a sincere pleasure in the very art of naming what has been, as if to acknowledge that though it remains impossible to retain a tangible hold upon the past, there exists prodigious fun in playing with memory. Consider for example "Rock N Roll," where an Elvis song draws the speaker's mother into his room. Transporting them both to the fantasy of a teenaged date, she falls onto her son's bed,
Whether troping family or not, One Wish Left quite tellingly presents time itself as a central metaphor, where the present stands for the past and vice versa. "Daylight Savings," aptly coming as the first poem in this collection, locates the speaker in his old neighborhood shifting from one familiar image to the next, only to find himself near the conclusion with, "One/more hour of light to kill," just enough time to remember how his father died as well as how he did not love a woman with whom he slept seven months earlier. To be sure, memory often returns the speaker of these poems to painful realizations of loss. Accepted as inevitable, however, more often than not the poet tries to take pleasure in recounting his fate. In "2B," a self-described everyman isolates in his apartment, maintaining a rather bare existence in the first stanza:
In the following stanzas, the reader is privy to a much darker interior where shades are always shut and the bathtub needs scrubbing. The source of his isolation, we soon learn, is his wife moving to Phoenix with his two daughters. The answer to his loss, like the response to memory throughout this collection, is to indulge a world full of popular culture in the hope of transforming it into something of greater significance:
In this conclusion, Gloeggler arrives at the title of his book as well as what it means to play with the past. Here time is literally of the essence; it cannot be reduced any further, only enjoyed for the frustrating limits it sets upon desire. Masturbation serves as the perfect kind of play for what it means to write in the modern age where meaning-making comes to naught (much like "a burnt match skating in a urinal" in Hart Crane's The Bridge. Though deftly capturing the universal theme of regret, such play also regrettably proves the greatest weakness in this book. This poem sets apart the first half of what it means to live within the tragedy of time, making Hamlet's all important existential question, "To be or not to be" mere positive assertion, albeit without much hope. Referring to the master of capturing the passing of time, I find a Yeatsian exploration of the self in relation to the past most missing in this poetry. Such a sustained dialectic seen in "Among School Children" (a poem that functions on the level of the speaker's self-questioning) or "The Tower" (whose speaker challenges the absurdity of old age tied to him "as to a dog's tail"), provides ample opportunity for variation upon an all important theme. Too often Gloeggler seems intent on resolving self-questioning too quickly and in a rather predictable manner. This uniform approach is reflected in the structuring of nearly all of the poems, wherein narrow, heavily enjambed free verse stanzas fall predictably like arrows straight down the page. Rather than juxtaposing identity against a litany of allusions to popular culture, more probing of the self in relation to the self a la Yeats might get these poems that otherwise function fine individually into a more complex harmony with each other. Similarly, greater experimentation with form and even rhyme might produce more diverse poetry in a collection that at times sounds the same note. Roger Sedarat's poetry has appeared in such journals as Atlanta Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Green Mountains Review. He received a 2002 St. Botolph Grant in Poetry and is currently pursuing a PhD in English at Tufts University. |
Copyright © 2003 by Roger Sedarat.
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