Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New

by Ed Ochester

This collection includes the entire text ofSnow White Horses, Ochester's earlier selected poems, as well as selections fromLand of Cockaigneand a generous sampling of new poems."

Genres: Poetry

200 pages, Paperback

First published June 10, 2007

About the author

Ed Ochester is the editor of the Pitt Poetry Series and is a member of the core faculty of the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars. He has published seven books of poems, as well as eight limited editions, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the George Garrett Award from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, and the "artist of the year" award from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. Poems of his were selected for Best American Poems 2007 and 2013.

Reviews

[Timons Esaias]

I recently picked up a couple of Ochester titles I didn't have, and then realized I'd never read this one (already on my shelf) from cover to cover. So now they sit on the unread shelf, and this one graduates to my display collection.

Ed Ochester, among other things an editor of the late, lamented 5AM, doesn't need my praise or approval, but let me say that I strongly admire this collection. I plan to try out some of his strategies in future poems of my own, in fact.

Favorites include the title poem "Unreconstructed" and also "Butterfly Effect" from among the new poems. From the collected works: "Packing Lunch" "The Relatives" "For the Zoroastrians" and "The Muse".

"The Whitehead Metals Stickball Team at Lunch Hour on W. 10th St." takes a memory, and a cast of characters, and pulls out meaning. (There's so much pain you're a fool/ for talking about it. But what's amazing/ is how those in pain think it's normal./ What's wonderful is that it never changes:/ how the damned laugh and sing when they can,/ how the years change everything to gold.)

For me, collector of elephants, the final poem of this collection is special: "For Ganesha, Hindu God of Good Fortune" with its ....They said that you broke off your tusk/ to write the sacred books for the gods,/ and you sit tonight in the dark Museum/ with a self-satisfied grin, and the tusk/ in your right hand and sweet rice cake/ in your left, having done what you could/ in improbable circumstances... which then follows the poet home from his residency in the South. I admire how the poems shift from gods to personal life to nature to Art to metaphor, but without any pretension or fuss. In Ochester's world Bach wrote, and the tiny wren sings, but we need not belabor the comparison.

Best quote, it must be said, is from "Pocahontas": ....And if you eat/ of the fruit of Disney/ you will die.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ochester is a poet of the people, a poet of the earth. He writes with humor, grace, and resignation tinged with railing about the loss of loved ones and old co-workers and neighbors. Loss generally means death--but because he provides such a portrait of person and place, the dead seem present--but it can also refer to old friends who have become "saved" and who now hold creationism in high regard as in the poem, "Butterfly Effect." This poem also contains farts, BTW. This old friend, Walter, shows up in other poems, as does some guy named Ed Shreckengost, who appears in a poem named after him, and in a poem with one of the best titles of the collection: "Arvida Klingensmith Would Like to Invite You to Church." In the volume "Changing the Name to Ochester," there is a series of poems about a group of fellas he worked with years ago (Duke, Jackie Olson) reminiscent of the blue collar grounded quality of Philip Levine.

The voice in several of these collected poems alludes to myth, philosophy, etc.--subjects beyond the earthy tangibles--but they seem to be quick references, stashed away in a flash, lest he be found out by his family and peers to be an intellectual, or perhaps because he wants to primarily be a voice of the "common people," not one for the "elite learned." I don't feel a tension in him because of this dualiy--after all, he is both--the allusions are just part of the deal.

The poems about his dead family are so vivid and tender, he nearly resurrects them. "The Canaries in Uncle Arthur's Basement" and "The Relatives" do some wonderful reviving work. Both poems are love songs in a way, for the child the speaker once was, for his aunts and uncles, for the sadness and beauty he remembers about them all. I love "Canaries" for its weaving of the concrete and abstract, the very real disappointment Aunt Lizzie feels when Uncle Arthur misses Thanksgiving dinner, how we end on a "brilliant gold bird burst(ing) into song." In "Relatives," Ochester conflates his aunts and uncles leaving the house after the holiday party is over to performers leaving the stage:

and when they left and walked out into the black
and under the street lamps on Woodhaven Blvd.
it was as though they were walking through spotlights
the way Jimmy Durante did on television
at the end of the program slowly walking,

his back bent, from spotlight to spotlight
stopping at each to turn and wave and
walk again into an infinite regression
of lights, turning and waving,
kissing goodbye.

One of my favorite poems in the collection is "For the Zoroastrians." An entertaining treatise in which you'll learn a little something, the poem combines history, religion, etymology, and the personal. And animals, of course.

Lastly, this poem is a good example of Ochester's sense of humor and place, nearly a haiku:

Monroeville, PA

One day a kid yelled
"Hey Asshole!"
and everybody on the street
turned around

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://dog-earedpoetry.blogspot.com/2...