Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

August Kleinzahler is one of the few poets I look forward to reading these days, and this new book, which actually brings together poems from the period 1975-1990, is a welcome addition to his list of publications. Some of the poems were published locally in a couple of small press pamphlets, but I doubt that they had a wide circulation. It’s useful to have them collected in one volume, along with an informative and entertaining afterword by Kleinzahler.

     I suppose it’s true to say that more recent work by him displays greater technical confidence, but these early poems are still deftly handled and seem to slide effortlessly across the page. Kleinzahler can take routine matters like the movement of meat and make them suggestive of deeper things:

Out of the haze of industrial meadows
They arrive, numberless
Hauling tons of dead lamb
Bone and flesh and offal
Miles to the ports and channels
Of the city’s shimmering membrane
A giant breathing cell
Exhaling its waste
From the stacks by the river
And feeding through the night

The lines break at the right places so that the rhythm is sustained and the language, though drawn from the everyday, takes on a special significance in which the ordinary is raised to the level of the curious. And Kleinzahler is good at catching little scenes which often point to the sadness of unfulfilled lives:

What to make of them, the professors
in their little cars,
the sensitive men paunchy with drink
parked at the fence
where the field begins and the suburb ends?

     Music also plays a large part in the poems, with descriptions of how “the luscious soundtrack/ pulls the old movie down the line” and references to how “the bass and drums are about to fly/ off the beat/ and lose the soloist orbiting/ round it.” Names are mentioned - Eric Dolphy, Bill Evans - and moods evoked. But what I like most of all about Kleinzahler is his capacity to focus on things we can all identify with and invest them with significance:

And who were they all in your sleep last night
               chattering so
you’d think that when you woke
the living room would be full of friends and
                                                       ghosts?