Reviews
Chasing Saturday Night - Michael Kriesel
Marsh River Editions, M233 Marsh Road, Marshfield, Wisconsin 54449, USA 40 pages $10 US
There is a grace in the writing of Michael Kriesel that makes him one of the most interesting of modern American poets. Apart from a ten-year stint as a journalist in the US Navy, Kriesel has lived his life in the Wisconsin countryside. Chasing Saturday Night pays homage to his grandparents and his upbringing.Kriesel’s plain, conversational style lends itself perfectly to this unpretentious yet mysterious and deceptively complex inheritance, which he now has no need to leave. The relationships within the family and with the outside world are not easy to pin down. Experiences are stored, rarely spoken about, but occasionally surface through the everyday routines, as when Kriesel, for there is no reason to believe he is not the narrator here, is helping one of his grandmothers to make grape jam. A gentle domestic scene is set, then as he sets the jars on a table to cool near the TV, the poem suddenly strikes deep... the TV kept showing a tape loop/ of two airplanes crashing into/ buildings in New York/ the bodies falling endlessly/ the way we do in dreams/ everything repeating/ every time she heard the popping/ of a metal lid announcing/ that another jar had sealed/ Grandma’d say/ the Japs are bombing us again/ her brother’s death in World War Two/ somewhere in the future/ Normandy a funny word/ nobody in Milwaukee knew/ pouring the next to last batch/ I told her this was different/ but she said the dead/ are just as dead/ no matter what the TV says/ then she turned the TV off/ like God commanding darkness by remote... ('Grape Jam'). It’s by some distance the most effective 9.11 poem I’ve read.
The book begins with Kriesel’s boyhood memories of fishing with his grandfather, catching perch, bullheads, a bluegill - and once, the sun: big as a Frisbee it didn’t struggle/ but still it was hard for a kid to reel in/ lying there flexing its gills it looked like/ someone spilled rainbow syrup on its scales... ('Sunfish'). And, accompanied from time to time by photographs that he acknowledges as a part of his inheritance, the story moves on through the deaths and burials... now you’re in the nursing home/ and no one else remembers/ how you kept two riding mowers/ in a sagging wooden shed/ so both of us could mow the lawn/ until the shadow from the barn/ said it was time for a beer ('Countryside'). And of course the homes are cleared and sold on, though he visits one when the new owners, from Chicago, are not at home. there’s no one there right now so I pull over/ park and stare at the asparagus/ some ancestor planted in the 1920s/ gone to seed and waving in the sunny breeze/ some of the stalks/ grown thick as an old man’s thumb ('Grampa’s Old Place'). These are billed, in the subtitle of the book as Poems About Rural Wisconsin. Not so. They’re about the things we inherit, the things we must hold on to, sometimes without acknowledgement and Kriesel, who has been published in iota, has put together a small but special collection. It won’t be available in British bookshops. Direct from the publisher is probably the best way. I don’t have a website address, but this is the 11th publication from this small press, so they are established enough to seek out.
Page(s) 53-54
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