7/31/2019 Review of Old Men, Girls and Monsters by Peter Schwartz

1/4

7/31/2019 Review of Old Men, Girls and Monsters by Peter Schwartz

2/4

Most of all, this series unfolds a language of loss andreconnection:

Ive sweat and salvaged the musicof your plastic plateau

played archivist to the here-after of your soft lightning

and irredeemable thunderIve built museums in

your absence to rememberthat absence

There are wonderfully simple and clear images to be found,youve left me / sick as a parachute / with no passenger inthe penny / alleys and troubled corners of / our partialextinction. Even though this sequence maps the latitudes ofgrief, there is a very real warmth and fondness permeatingSchwartzs writing throughout. He displays an adept andextremely relaxed facility with near rhyme, alternately usingassonance and alliteration to imbue the sequence with agentle harmony. The individual confessions of this sequence

are not confessional (in the narrow solipsism we tend toassociate with the phrase, rather its exact opposite) or even inthe Roman Catholic tradition, rather they are songs thatbecome hymns through their (un?)requited and profoundyearning for understanding and acceptance within a spiritualframework. All of which makes anonymous confessions asubstantial and noteworthy achievement.

The second part of the collection is formed of individual butinter-related poems such as artificial light, a meditation on

being a writer, and much more than that, being a writer whoreaches out to humanity in its all-encompassing andbeautifully-flawed fragility where, if we were / guilty it wasonly of being / aerodynamic, of being living catalogs a senseof letting so much fly past us in our slipstream yet at the sametime trying to catch as much of this fleeting life as we can,Kafkas handfuls of the stream.

In portraiture Schwartz makes free and easy with the sonnetform in a five-poem sequence but thats not to say he plays

fast and loose with it, look closer and you see a very tightcontrol, the sort of deceptively simple manoeuvrings of

7/31/2019 Review of Old Men, Girls and Monsters by Peter Schwartz

3/4

mastery. please dont name that reservoir reminds me of aline written about The Brothers Karamazov, that it is such astrange book that it must hold an almost irrefutable anduncomfortable truth,

a reservoir of objects and objections, of near and farreaching paralysis, of defiled ambiguity, voyeurism, puppet

games, preservatives, hot-and-coldhatred, and silencers.

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of drones, blurs and tiny murders

of hypocrisy, pollution and bad artifice

but it is also a reservoir of strange powerslow fermentation, chances and mercy.

At this point I feel like a pedant, the worst sort of critic who isdetermined to find fault or flaw, something I didnt like orthought could be improved within this collection so Ill give it,

just one, and its a fault in Schwartzs consistency; his use, oromission in this case, of end-line commas sometimes it just

doesnt scan it can interrupt the flow and makes the readerstop where they shouldnt need to stop, as in artificial light,where we read, hourly guerrillas / reinvented cynics, whichcan be read over the lines making no sense in the context ofthe poem, unlike most of the examples where it is impossibleto do so. Told you, real nit-picking.

If I had the time I could easily and willingly write 1500 / 2000words on every poem in Old Men, Girls and Monsters, theresso much meaning packed into each and every line and phrase;

the writing is extremely dense which is not to say that it is inany way impenetrable its anything but, being clear andaccessible, layered in its valences. Part of me doesnt want tosay that this is the best book of poetry, and not just newpoetry, that I read in 2010 (and will continue to read for yearsto come) but its a very small, curmudgeonly part tipping itshat to the ancients and stolidly-established, tiny in comparisonto that part of me which is delighted to be made aware of thismost gracious and humane voice emerging in poetry. OldMen, Girls and Monsters is a beautifully-wrought reflection of

what it is to be human, to be no more than one of thosehaunted stars / in a box of aching heirlooms.

7/31/2019 Review of Old Men, Girls and Monsters by Peter Schwartz

4/4