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4.5
Lee Herrick is one of those rare poets who manages to fuse narrative brevity with lyrical generosity, the result being a collection that both challenges and entertains the reader. For instance, in the deft opening of one poem, Herrick writes, "If all the words in the world / rhyme, then // oranges taste like being alive...", thus taking a linguistic tidbit that poetry readers have probably heard before (that no word in the English language rhymes with "orange,") and brilliantly recasting it to emphasize the vibrancy of life itself: a quality that is both unique and, paradoxically, ubiquitous.This same sense of duality shines throughout many of the poems, including "Light" (one of my favorites), which suggests that, "If love is air, then you breathe it into the world..." Precisely because Herrick so staunchly avoids pretension by merging accessible language with the wildness of imaginative longing (traits also evident in another of my favorite poems, "The Impossible Replication of Desire"), these poems bristle with tension, even as they ease down the page--a duality that few modern poets dare attempt, let alone with such success.I've also found myself returning again and again to "Chorus," a poem which begins by promising us that, "The holes in the flute can be covered, / as can the gaps in the heart." The tactile quality of that first line somehow manages to make heartbreak itself more tangible than should be possible, even as the poem goes to detail "the music / of your starry body..." and describe laughter as "a palette, our own drum solo..." As a lifelong music-lover, I found a wonderful sense of jazz in Herrick's work, a rhythm both primal and polished that makes this a collection I'm sure to visit again.
