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The Reception
Poetry. These narrative and lyric poems draw one in, word by word and line by line. Rooted in a desirous present, they reach forward into the future, and one wants to reach with them.
"In my dream of this book, the dead are carried high up overhead. They upbraid the ground, its evacuations, and don't come to rest. Michael O'Leary, with THE RECEPTION, gives us the watchman of the terrible hour—the upbound city, reconnaissance, with its fragile, unremitted geometries—and we, his readers, are made tenuous, and beholden, and in nite, by the verse's elegant tendering of 'the supple granulation of a very ancient wound.' This is a nest elegy, to the day, and so to history, its suspirations, and the ossatures that, imperfectly, receive it."—Nathanaël
"In my dream of this book, the dead are carried high up overhead. They upbraid the ground, its evacuations, and don't come to rest. Michael O'Leary, with THE RECEPTION, gives us the watchman of the terrible hour—the upbound city, reconnaissance, with its fragile, unremitted geometries—and we, his readers, are made tenuous, and beholden, and in nite, by the verse's elegant tendering of 'the supple granulation of a very ancient wound.' This is a nest elegy, to the day, and so to history, its suspirations, and the ossatures that, imperfectly, receive it."—Nathanaël
64 pages, Paperback
Published July 5, 2016
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About the author
Michael O'Leary
195 books7 followersVarious authors
For the New Zealand poet & author, see https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
For the New Zealand poet & author, see https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 12, 2016
The Reception is thirteen poems, two -- "American Bridge Company" and the title poem -- in nine-poem sequences, the two sequences structured, unsurprisingly, given that its author is a civil engineer, along the design-model of the vault: what typically will join two consequent sections of a sequence together is the resemblance-claim made between some image, or lexical choice, closing one and the development of the trope, made somewhat explicitly, in the subsequent section. "The Reception," oddly enough, for this volume, is a social satire turned, Gatsby-like, against the author's own upper midwestern déclassé high school chums re-encountered at the wedding of former classmates. The poem is narrated in the close third person indirect point of view by one Jay Manson, who, shrewdly, does not open the poem; the poem's opening lines are in the narrator's more menacingly amoral voice ("Charlie Gatsby," let's call it):
Some say life is what you make of it,
a give and take between desire and need.
Some say that our decline is permanent
and general, unavoidable, like dust
along a gravel road kicked up by cars
proceeding past an apple orchard crabbed
with casual neglect straight to the plash
of water jetting from a triton's conch
beneath the leafy oaks where wedding guests
arrive like undecidable statements.
The sequence's first poem turns out to be about a character from Jay Manson's high school past: Lily Park, who, we learn at length, is a lawyer with whom Jay used to travel back and forth to college. Stuck by the wedding in the sagged-over middle of the rust belt, the narrator imagines in section two the dissemblance between Provence and the large tent of wedding-goers, out beyond which the Kentucky Hills reminds the narrator of the Townes Van Zandt song, "Pancho and Lefty," which is the title of the sequence's third section. O'Leary likes to begin a poem with a strongly descriptive scene derivative of the image he's just offered us (here, Van Zandt's fictional alter-egos): "A syndicate of aging hipsters stood | carousing at the makeshift bar, dressed in | tan shabby suits and vintage cocktail frocks | while conversation oscillated from | the politics of monoculture crops | to the terroir of straight Elijah Craig." The insouciant narration of a conversation between Jay and his high school buddy, Dave Huerta, is full of Mametian bile: "'Do you remember that fat piece of shit Anthony Walker?' | "'Mr. Anal Chug?'" and O'Leary presents the analogy between these two balladic heroes and Van Zandt's hipsters as a kind of God's smile vaulted over the action of this social ritual.
"American Bridge Company," the other long sequence, much more earnestly pays homage to Benjamin's Angel of History, through acknowledging the structural vaulting of the Chicago Hancock Tower and the various debts it owes to the engineers and architectural forms precedent in its vast spectacle. O'Leary's whole gestalt is one of homage, beyond the social satires, and there are odes to the railroads, highways, and the late springs of the Mid West, as well as to the Midwest itself, and its locales -- The Chess Pavilion, for example. There's a puckish humor to "Ghost Rider," another poem on the fictional financial magnate "von Hempel," subject of a poem in O'Leary's Flood Editions partner Devin Johnston's Sources, "The Ghost Writer" -- O'Leary's must be an answer poem, or perhaps both poems were written on the same assignment, one I take it O'Leary originally accepted. Biography informs the poems even when they're not in a satirical mode, for instance in a lovely reckoning of Obama's grief-filled return to Honolulu on the eve of his 2008 apotheosis.
An unusual poetry collection, and recommended --
Some say life is what you make of it,
a give and take between desire and need.
Some say that our decline is permanent
and general, unavoidable, like dust
along a gravel road kicked up by cars
proceeding past an apple orchard crabbed
with casual neglect straight to the plash
of water jetting from a triton's conch
beneath the leafy oaks where wedding guests
arrive like undecidable statements.
The sequence's first poem turns out to be about a character from Jay Manson's high school past: Lily Park, who, we learn at length, is a lawyer with whom Jay used to travel back and forth to college. Stuck by the wedding in the sagged-over middle of the rust belt, the narrator imagines in section two the dissemblance between Provence and the large tent of wedding-goers, out beyond which the Kentucky Hills reminds the narrator of the Townes Van Zandt song, "Pancho and Lefty," which is the title of the sequence's third section. O'Leary likes to begin a poem with a strongly descriptive scene derivative of the image he's just offered us (here, Van Zandt's fictional alter-egos): "A syndicate of aging hipsters stood | carousing at the makeshift bar, dressed in | tan shabby suits and vintage cocktail frocks | while conversation oscillated from | the politics of monoculture crops | to the terroir of straight Elijah Craig." The insouciant narration of a conversation between Jay and his high school buddy, Dave Huerta, is full of Mametian bile: "'Do you remember that fat piece of shit Anthony Walker?' | "'Mr. Anal Chug?'" and O'Leary presents the analogy between these two balladic heroes and Van Zandt's hipsters as a kind of God's smile vaulted over the action of this social ritual.
"American Bridge Company," the other long sequence, much more earnestly pays homage to Benjamin's Angel of History, through acknowledging the structural vaulting of the Chicago Hancock Tower and the various debts it owes to the engineers and architectural forms precedent in its vast spectacle. O'Leary's whole gestalt is one of homage, beyond the social satires, and there are odes to the railroads, highways, and the late springs of the Mid West, as well as to the Midwest itself, and its locales -- The Chess Pavilion, for example. There's a puckish humor to "Ghost Rider," another poem on the fictional financial magnate "von Hempel," subject of a poem in O'Leary's Flood Editions partner Devin Johnston's Sources, "The Ghost Writer" -- O'Leary's must be an answer poem, or perhaps both poems were written on the same assignment, one I take it O'Leary originally accepted. Biography informs the poems even when they're not in a satirical mode, for instance in a lovely reckoning of Obama's grief-filled return to Honolulu on the eve of his 2008 apotheosis.
An unusual poetry collection, and recommended --
Displaying 1 of 1 review