Road Work Ahead

by Raymond Luczak

Poetry. LGBT Studies. In the follow-up to his critically acclaimed collection MUTE, Raymond Luczak sets out on a turbulent journey after ending a 15-year relationship. The poems of ROAD WORK AHEAD follow Luczak as he meets kindred souls on his travels and wonders what it means to love again. He opens the suitcase of his heart in far-flung cities and points beyond. His poems, pungent with musk and ache, will open yours too.

Genres: Poetry

92 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2011

Reviews

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deaf-Man's Bluff

'Blind-man's Bluff: A blindfolded player uses sound over sight to find other players in this traditional children's game.' Reverse the rules of this favored pastime and there is an entry into the magic of Raymond Luczak's wondrously beautiful poetry, this collection being the fourth and called ROAD WORK AHEAD. An observant wanderer around the cities and the wilds of nature in search of repair after the loss of a fifteen year long relationship, Luczak has been deaf since infancy, and instead of accepting this loss of one of his senses as a handicap, he has turned this lack of registration of sounds into a more keenly focused eye, and heightened touch and scent and taste: the result of this realignment of his senses, coupled with a richly exotic ability as a wordsmith make him a poet of great importance. Music from composers and ensembles may not reach his perception, but the manner in which he writes suggests that he is sensitive to both cacophony and harmony: he has heard music with his well-worn but inevitably open and sensitive heart.

Luczak's poems range from remembered moments of desire and pleasure that he shares in a manner that draws the reader into the immediacy of the moment, as in LUMINESCENCES:

Trucks thundered by your blinded bedroom window:
your eyelids did not flicker from light's slices.
The moon was enraptured, as I was,
with your round face. You hinted secret smiles.

What dreams were you dreaming? I thought of the moon
where I'd drive from dusk to dawn past craters,
but somehow all your friends who'd died knew
you'd find them there on the blue-lined summits.

There, you stood proudly from your moon buggy to
wave everyone from the luminous darkness.
"It's beautiful here," you whispered.
Gravity made the earth clouds swirl sadly.

I slept beside you, our warm glow (like babies
not yet aware of their effect on parents)
illuminating my hushed silence.
I love your body, a wonderful moon.

There are fragments of poems that adhere to the mind once read. In a poem titled IN THAT DARK NIGHT (for D.W. who said "I want to feel your heartbeat in your lips.") one portion of this long poem is intensely fragile: 'In you I suddenly found a map of ache/ with destinations dotted by fireflies/ bottled in your eyes. When you shook/my hand, the fireflies escaped everywhere/into a hovering campfire begging stories./ A log covered with cushy moss awaited.' In other poems we feel the wandering travels of a soul perhaps lost, perhaps coping with the loss of a longtime lover, finding varying degrees of solace in momentary encounters, combing the cities of the world, searching. But Luczak's works are not morose or maudlin but rather a private sharing of the largos and codas of the type of music he creates with his pen. Among the poems in this collection there is one that stands unique, telling us of the other interstices of his experience, of his ability to remain universal in his language.
PALLETS

In the dingy warehouse shell-shocked
by bitter words of divorce and death,
the cement floor is worn smooth,
crisscrossed from black rubber tires.
The floor is a topographic map.
In one corner of yet another country
soon to be conquered, a valley
of sentimentalities, a nation's pride,
a cemetery plot marked, is a tall box.

Years have taught these men how to pack
so nothing would break, not like
their souls broken like eggshells,
seeping into composts near gardens
never theirs to grow in the first place.
All they've got left is the waft of dreams
so hallucinatory it keeps them awake
for days when their wives close
thighs in the hour of constant need.

In their hands are hammers and mouthfuls
of nails ready to seal each upright coffin
only to be dismantled in another warehouse
in a country different from this.
The spoils of war are easily rotted.
Go, my dear pallet, go with God.

Raymond Luczak may lack hearing but his other senses are so highly polished that his time with us could very well be Deaf-man's Bluff. He of no auditory input creates symphonies of sound as we read his profoundly touching poetry. ROAD WORK AHEAD is an opportunity to enter his world - and is yet another powerful receptacle of the stunning works that SiblingRivalryPress continues to offer to lovers of the written arts. Highly Recommended.

Grady Harp

[Telly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great collection of poetry that maps out self-exploration through relationships lost and gained and the timeless places and monuments that dot the sphere of our world and beyond. There's a collective sense of longing, wondering, and wandering throughout these poems that reoccurs through their mindful arrangement. In the end, I could not help but be left with feelings of encouragement, displacement, and discovery that felt hauntingly familiar.

Poems worth lingering on are Orbit, In Repose, Inevitability, 2005, Pirates, In Battery Park City, Road Work Ahead, Dupont Circle, 3 A.M., and To My Weary Traveler.

[Molly · Rating 2 out of 5]

I felt as if most of these poems resembled strong undergraduate poems--poems by students of mine that I thought held a lot of promise but weren't quite there yet. Many of these poems seemed to be meant for someone who, as one of my grad instructors would put it, "was there but we weren't." Do these poems belong to absent lovers or the reader?