Rattling good read

 I’m reading the latest pamphlet sent with Rattle, George Bilgere’s ‘Cheap Motels of my Youth.’ At the half way point, here’s a mildly acid report on a collection George picked up, with an airgun, from a cardboard moving box unopened for half a century. “An astonishingly debut” says the blurb. Hmm. The new poem, “Insult to Injury” has just the right tone for dealing a blow to, or taking a shot at, a brother poet. Very funny.

Coincidentally trying something like that for a dusty pamphlet I have just found in the bookcase, mildly disliked from years ago, I’m reminded the promotional excerpt on the new Rattle pamphlet was misleading. Perhaps I had been outmanoeuvred. The chapbook prize winner is better than the out-of-context lines taken from “Misting”

Each day brings more bad weather,
which is another way of saying
I’m in my sixties.  But here, in the frail
September morning, my hands tipped in fog,
the flowers lift their faces to me
with bright, mystifying questions,
and for once I have an answer.

It reads better when you understand misting, means… misting: a nozzle setting for watering flowers. I had failed the meaning and missed the ‘mystifying’ echo and pun, I thought we had a poetic device not followed through.  Too quick to judge.

Following ‘At the Carwash’ by Arthur Russell,  here is another collection of blank verse, commonplace reminiscences from a middle aged man.  The brutal thing itself!  And again it is at times, very touching and in all, totally worthwhile. A privilege to read.  Right up the editor’s street I guess.

Rattle’s Timothy Green is a hard-working editor and a powerfully good essayist on poets. His interview pieces in the journal keep me entering the competitions while pretty sure my only success will be the subscription that comes with the fee.  

God knows, accessible, clear-headed writing should be lauded above the common stock. Still, better than the straightforward, confessional writings of mature men, I would submit, if I dared, that Poetry offers something more spiritual, more universally embracing, when it is on track, that is more mystical. And this sort of thing is not. Hey ho, I send submissions, regret my failings at leisure, happy with my lot.

See Rattle Chapbooks