I first encountered Ronald Wallace's poetry at an English Department faculty gathering back in the fall of 2006. It had a bite and a humorous edge -- perhaps because it was more tightly selected and directed, perhaps from the way Wallace reads -- than the bulk of what's in The Uses of Adversity.
Which is not to say that the poetry is bad. Not in the least. But it is not what I remembered. Or perhaps not what I made it to be in my memory. And it was those memories that prompted me to pull this collection down from the display at the local Borders.
Maybe that and the fact that every time I read it out to myself, the title prompts me to think about -- and start singing -- KT Tunstall's "The Beauty of Uncertainty".
Wallace is playing, primarily, with form in these poems. Or rather, he has bound his memory with a loose sonnet form -- an Italian octave and sestet throughout the collection. Rhyme is only occasional and I did not take the time to read enough of the verse out loud to get a strong sense of commonalities of meter.
The collection is dominated by memories and, inasmuch as the gaze is a long one, by aging, though Wallace himself is a vigorous poet. These poems aren't burdened by the memories encapsulated, yet neither do they set sail. Perhaps it is not the years but the form that limits?
They read, to me, as a poet telling stories, quite contently, as he looks out his back door.
No comments:
Post a Comment