arlene ang

Arrival is another
optical illusion of departure—

... when the eye sees something beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce it.

                                      — Elain Scarry



Grateful acknowledgement is made to Oana Cambrea for the use of her digital art, Autumn (2007).

When I idly bought an old copy of the 1996 Forward Book of Poetry in the local bookstore, little did I know about getting hooked on the works of Deryn Rees-Jones and Robert Rehder.

After receiving a couple of Amazon.com gift checks and some birthday loot, I decided to plunge into black-box purchase of their poetry collections. And, glad to say, I wasn't disappointed.

The Memory Tray overflows with teas to everyone's taste and includes that special brew of a transvestite posing as Marilyn Monroe—one of my favorites. Like the poem with the same title, "The Memory Tray" offers a fascinating and surreal journey into the poet's mind-maze:

                   Here instead is my dream.
                   I remember it in order: (1) a big man
                   (2) with his big hands (3) in a maze who
                   Sees (4) a flock of birds, then,
                   Stoops (5) to tie his shoes, his fingers
                   (6's and 7's) fingering the laces sadly
                   Like the drooping heads of flowers...

The 37 poems in Rees-Jones' first collection encompass a wide range of characters, from the Great Mutando who makes a Dachshund from three pink balloons to Grandma in the garden watching from a chair, one wild Modigliani eye hooking the clouds. Her excellent sense of word choice captivates, her observations, always vibrant with originality, bring even the most mundane of situations to life like in "Connections" where a wrong number connects the loneliness of two women and "The Dinosaur Summer", which handles the Jurassic Park fad with satin gloves, may leave the reader suddenly aroused.

Another one of my favorites, "Meeting the Queen" wears the clothes of a bag lady reminiscing about her past as the perfect debutante. The ending settles her back into reality:

                   ... It's cold. I sleep
                   under the arches in old newspaper. Old hat. Sometime
                   the print comes off and writes itself across my skin. Often
                   my feet turn blue. Mornings, I'm out of tune, not sure
                   exactly who or where I am.

Robert Rehder's The Compromises Will Be Different is a delightful read. Perhaps more accessible than Rees-Jones' poetry, his snapshot observations sink with more immediacy. The couplets flit around the poet's quirky domestic life like "The Albatross" from one train of thought to another:

                   This poem is in trouble. I have not
                   Been able to finish it.

                   The walls are printed with the shadows
                   Of Faith Whittelesey's pictures

                   As if we were living in the stamp album
                   Of a new collector.

What really tickled me was "The Pequod Meets the Virgin" which stands out because of the fury expressed—Rehder in all 51 poems seems a tranquil man with a morbid dread of throwing away things. Though, in "Corminboeuf IV", he did throw his soft-boiled egg at Eleanor Hagebaeck as a child. The poem is a Monty-Pythonlike rant against the criticism of someone called D who:

                   ... edits an obscure magazine

                   Of quite breath-taking mediocrity,
                   Due to his incapacity

                   To tell a good poem from a bad one
                   And made more obscure

                   By the publication of his own mawkish verses.

What follows is a series of violent thoughts, deals with the Mafia included. The ending agrees to forgive and forget with a vow of undying hatred. No doubt, something cruelly rejected writers may love to hang on their walls. It certainly makes me smile every time.