Blessings in Disguise

by David Clewell

Book by Clewell, David

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

David Clewell was an American poet and creative writing instructor at Webster University. From 2010-2012, he served as the Poet Laureate of Missouri.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even in 1989, when Blessings in Disguise was a winning entrant in the National Poetry Series, it must have seemed a throwback: both to the period style of the early seventies (the poems' publications date from about 1976), as well as the romantic ethnographic mode of the fifties, a worldview that structures these poems all too thoroughly at times, for example in "Depot: Beaver Dam, Wisconsin," in which the narrator, on his way by bus to go see his girl, is tapped on the shoulder by a bum on the make, and the narrator is tested in his assumptions -- that the soul is blood, and that blood finds a way, even past death, to keep moving, and that the souls trapped in a Bus Depot on a night of delayed passage keep affecting each other, as well as the girl who doesn't know on whom she waits. You get the feeling it's all in the narrator's head, and the modern part of the poem is that the narrator isn't ignorant of this possibility, "That I'm running my own story up and down | my tongue until I'm sure I'll be convincing." And frankly it's not, or not quite, if the romantic aura of it is something to resist, and when I read it in 1989, it certainly was. Now I read it with something like historical sympathy, conscious of the way that the identification with the ethnographic mode is in the formal decisions like the enjambment in that last quoted couplet, a use of the line to test, so here, as elsewhere, the form circles back on itself. In 1989 that wasn't a scrutable modernism, sd me. Now it seems to me only another doubtful romanticism -- and there's lots of those, better choose among them. Where Clewell's romanticism becomes more formally sinuous is in the sequences -- long foraging multi-part inventories of the American psychic/demotic. When such foraging is constellated into a form, say the sestina, in "Traveller's Advisory," the narrator practically disappears into the mode, pulling from the attic box one romantic cliche after another; when it's let loose across the sequences, however, the narrator searches for a rhetoric, and becomes a bit more clear to himself.