World Class Poetry Blog

Chapbook Review: Harpoon
30 January 2008, the poet @ 9:09 pm

I recently reviewed a chapbook of poems titled Harpoon, written by lawyer Michael Cavendish. You can read the full review at World Class Poetry.

Right now I’d like to offer a critique of one of the poems in the chapbook, “The Poppies.” According to the Foreword, written by an anonymous endorser, “The Poppies” was written “as a form of lyrics accompanying the silent music of a show of paintings by the artist Tayloe White. This, I believe, places the poem in the category known as Ekphrastic.

First, I’d like to say it intrigued me that the art of Tayloe White inspired the poem, which is effectively organized into numerous sections. Just how many sections, I don’t know, for the entire poem is not printed. Only sections 2, 3, 5, 7, and 8, enumerated by Roman numerals, appear in the chapbook.

Harpoon is a rather short chapbook. It consists of seven poems. Four of them I like, “The Poppies” is one of them, and three of them I don’t. Even the ones I like have some imperfections. “The Poppies,” as I state in my review, is a fitting opening poem for Harpoon simply because of its craft.

I’m not going to reprint the whole poem, but I will take a few lines from each section and reprint one entire section, below:

The Poppies

II

From worm’d rooty tilldirt
Spilled with bloodcurdle
On greenlegs and razorfish’d leaves

…

III

…

Bulbous boned breakwind bred of
scorched butter and stale strawberry wine
magni-munificent, resplendent in breeches of

Lime and saltpeter veinings,
hemmed with sashes of rock fungi black
impetuous rude liver spot, this

…

V

Dahlia-O-Pidgin holds a summer kitchen
twain the snail track and grasshopper jetties

where spindle-foot suckers and short-legged-armored truckers
collapse down deep to feed pails of plenty

and bounteous and full-fare selections,
her raw preparations du jour

slurping dribbles of clear shelled crustaceans,
antennae whirled in boar-boor–ish rapture

Dahlia delights in their tankering fests
each scrap and shaving an earning

for her wintry strongbox-cum-underdirt chest
(afull and afilled and locked from the rest)
which rumbles with sparrowcock’s spring yearning.

VII

akimbo from the acorn fall
cicada beaks busy at labor
trim jademint wainscott and emerald upholster
and seaglass porte …

VIII

…

nameless fellows there toil unreclined
kerchiefs in waterstain, cheeks rough with seed
puffing hues of onecandy salt-crabapple mellow
look polychrome sunshower downpours to find.

Cavendish’s obvious strengths are his sensitivity to language and vision. “The Poppies” does a good job of setting its own music, but it does an equally good job of breaking its own rules. At times, the poem shines and in other places the shine turns pale as contrivances enter in and Cavendish has a tendency to over reliance on alliteration, though his near-rhyme is splendid.

The opening lines of the poem are a beautiful start. I like how he takes ordinary words and makes them extraordinary by combining unexpected nouns and buttressing some of his nouns together with their adjectives. His employment of assonance and consonance are great when not overdone, but the overdone parts are thick and muddy. He certainly has imagination and I give him credit for that. When he doesn’t overwrite, he is honest, creative, and playful. Those are refreshing qualities and the playfulness doesn’t get in the way of the poetry as is the case with former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins, which is even better.

I like the Dahlia-O-Pidgin segment best, which is why I chose to reprint the entire section. Right off the bat he gives me action and beauty. A simple scene that I can visualize. The first line of the second stanza startles me with its length, but the internal rhyme brings me back to earth and the following line rings so musically that I want to kiss him. The lines that follow maintain the music, tone, and pace, but the long dash in the middle of “boorish,” done intentionally to draw attention to the back-to-back boar-boor, is so amateurish I’d like to turn my kiss into a kick. It murders the rapture, which is the perfect follow-up word. But Cavendish recovers from that mishap to take Dahlia to a sweet finish.

All in all, Cavendish writes well, but he is undeveloped. “The Poppies” is inventive and playful, and fits Tayloe White’s artwork well. Maybe too well.

Read the full review of Harpoon

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