The Case Against Happiness

by Jean-paul Pecqueur

Whether watching teens practice cheerleading in a surveillance video or discussing death with a shoe salesclerk, these poems ultimately find a certain joy and redemptive love. Wit and wry observation mark these disjointed narratives from an agile new voice.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2006

Reviews

[Gloria · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection to linger over and savor.
Not in gulps, but in small savory bites-- vivid imagery intent on soothing and startling in turn.
Made all the sweeter by having met The Poet.

Favorite lines:

For me, heaven's a metonymy
where the cosmos plays part
to ego's whole. Ash trees
line the street outside my window
like so many torched cigarettes.
See the problem? Which is heavier,
an inch of heaven or an ounce of lead?

[Ben Loory · Rating 5 out of 5]

i can't say i understand all of these poems-- they're like ladders you start climbing and then suddenly you're in another dimension-- but they have the same kind of sad and colorful mysterious clarity i reread prufrock for all the time.

from "Long Distance Communication":

... Last week I received a note
from my friend telling me he'd two months to go
at his current assignment, that the smoke
had mostly cleared, that his emotional life
was finally a blessing. But all I heard was that
there had been a fire, all number of structures
going up like genetically engineered blooms, and
that he was caught creeping around the heroic dark
with a five-gallon bucket of gasoline
and half a box of strike-anywhere matches.

and, my favorite part, from "Let's Go":

If she wasn't at work right now I would need to invent her.
If the stores ran out of sugar,
if the bees abandoned their hives,
if I wasn't teaching right now I'd surely call her.

The classroom's been set on fire, I'd say.
Someone spilt sun all over the desert.
I've this pain in my neck that aches like seltzer.
Let's go and see about those shoes.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't read poetry often so when I do I'm overly concerned with "getting it." It seems with this book I managed to get past that to some degree, and let the poems wash over me. That being said, it gets five stars for me liking it, not because I know anything about poetics.

Some of the poems I particularly enjoyed:

On the Way from Delphi
Yellowbirds
Patty Suddenly
Let's Go
Enter Here
The Case Against Happiness

I do know this will be a book I pick up again and again to read a poem or two at a time.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems written the way these are, by poets of Pecqueur's general sensibility, have a tendency to outrun the talents of their writers and slip into snotty irony. Good lines run to better lines, then fall away for some reason into Star Wars references or prose poems that read like the lose paper in an over-wrapped gift. I like these poems because, to me, they keep the good and avoid the bad of that way of writing. This is a really good book.

[Robert Corbett · Rating 5 out of 5]

funny, sad, searing, soaring. the case is well made, but we see glimmers of the contrary in Pecqueur's virtuoso command of syntax, music and thought. here is a poet, my friends!

[Maggie Golston]

Star star star star star

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty interesting stuff, particularly like "Patty Suddenly" or something to that effect. Doesn't reinvent the wheel, but does what it does well.