Isn't It Romantic? - John Popielaski (The Texas Review Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Isn't It Romantic?  John Popielaski.  The Texas Review Press.  Huntsville, Texas.  2012.

Winner, 2011 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize

Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World is what Today's book of poetry is currently reading for non-poetic giggles.  A real chuckle, that old Genghis Khan was not kidding around out there on those steppes.

So when I opened John Popielaski's Isn't It Romantic? last night and saw the Great Khan prancing around in the first poem I figured serendipity and history were both playing with me.

But Popielaski isn't playing, he is playful.  These poems are easy access gems, erudite and keen.

Boys

Saturday, October, lead slug loaded

in my father's Remington, my brother

and my friend took cover when I chose

my uncle's Monte Carlo, junked

but still in one piece, rusting, resting

in the sunlight, in the weeds.

Reading Hemingway years later, I remembered

how the trigger quietly resisted,

how the butt let loose and kicked

with mule force at my shoulder,

how the barrel leapt and the explosion

shook a snakeskin from the wheel well.

We marveled for a minute at the blast hole

we could fit our fists through, knelt and peered

across the bench seat to the daylight

of the exit wound, grew large

with such destruction and reloaded

as we strode like new men toward a Pinto.

...

Popielaski understands the silent rules of men, the dark foreboding of failure looming over unspoken transactions.  He knows that the smiling neighbour might not always smile.  But Today's book of poetry is on to Popielaski, we see an underlying optimism spiralling to the surface all through Isn't It Romantic?, or it could just be Popielaski's wit winnowing towards sunlight.

Elegy for Kenny Bighead, 39

If you're inclined toward admiration

for this man whose prized possession

was the bottle-cap collection

he'd amassed since he began

the steady drinking in the ninth grade

like the rest of us,

I'll have to pigeonhole you

as an optimist, not cockeyed

necessarily but as a person

who, despite these rouged cheeks

and this silk tie on this torso,

sees the bright side even

as his mother, an Italian,

trembles in the front row, dabbing

hopelessly at eyes that won't obey.

We tripped once at a Dead show

fifteen years ago this month

at RFK in Washington, our seats

a tier down from the nosebleeds,

and I wondered then what someone

in the anti-psychedelic field

of HVAC repair and installation

on Long Island saw in that

environment of glow sticks

and ecstatic dance and shared belief

in the redemptive power

of a band's extended jams.

It wasn't cool to ask.

And we diverged, I heard,

I heard, I heard about his progress

toward decline, the morning six packs

and the nights he still parked in

the power trails, the dense glow

of the seamless joints that made him

sense the inarticulate expression

of the cosmos in the ordinary

objects that, when he was younger,

he attempted on occasion to explode,

and no one whom I know was too

surprised when they were told,

but even knowing what we know

it is surreal to see him

dressed like this, embalmed,

supine among the flowers, mourned here

by we ironists, who afterward

will drink to him and shake our heads

like wizened sages at his passing.

...

Isn't It Romantic? is an entertaining romp from a Walt Whitman loving devotee, a poet with a love/hate relationship to ancient Sumeria because they discovered alcohol.

What Popielaski seemingly does best is to make fine poems out the minutiae of everyday life by making the necessary connections available to the reader at every turn.  We understand.

Invasion

I watched a line of ants last night

for hours instead of going

with my wife to visit friends

and wondered how the scent

of pheromones could organize

this guided missile of a march,

could summon loyal subjects,

wordless, from the woods.

The queen, I gathered, lounged

behind a cedar shingle just below

the eave, my cocked ear

picking up the crunch and rustle

of her bored realm, sawdust flashlit

in a spider's web my proof

her moving in was problematic.

Ortho's poison powder tapped out

on the corner of the step

was carried up by workers,

unsuspecting, a decision

as destructive as the Trojans'

to admit the Horse.

I did not burn a city down last night

but knew, according to the label,

things were not well in the nest.

This morning, casualties

are strewn, and I imagine,

morally, it's best to crush

the twitchers and the ones

who run in circles, clutching

larvae in their mandibles,

trying to regain a center,

but I know I am no better

than the realistic soldier

who persuaded Hector's widow

to hand her only child over

to the mercy of a quick fall

from the parapet, still high.

...

Both Saint Francis of A. and E. Hemingway darken Popielaski's doors, coyotes and wolves loom in the shadows competing for imaginary space, and John Popielaski skillfully and lovingly gets it all down.  He still believes we have a chance.

John Popielaski

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Popielaski was born in Port Jefferson Station, New York, and attended the State University of New York at Stony Brook and American University. He is the author of A Brief Eureka for the Alchemists of Peace (Antrim House) and O, Captain, which won the 2006 Ledge Press Poetry Chapbook Award.  He lives in Portland, Connecticut, and spends time at his camp in Maine.

texasreviewpress.org

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