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Transom
Poetry. Art. Color photographs by the author. Rick Mullin's TRANSOM is a poet's odyssey through the year 2016 set primarily in the financial district of Manhattan. The poems are written in a 15-line sonnet variant of Mullin's device, a form called the Third Sancerre. With views of the city from the docks at Hoboken's Lackawanna Terminal, from the top deck of the Ferry Stevens, and from the city's oldest streets—there are a few excursions to such places as Lake Charles, LA; Ithaca, NY; Cape May, NJ; and Cologne,Germany—TRANSOM logs the portents, "public and personal," of a transitional year. As X. Ray Burns wrote, "Public or personal, every situation, every moment of every day is a puzzle of beauty and ugliness. This goes generally unperceived or ignored by the masses. Mullin deciphers what most only observe."
84 pages, Paperback
Published March 15, 2017
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April 28, 2017
Transom is a master class in sonnet writing--or sonnet plus, as Rick Mullin has devised a new form he amusingly calls the Third Sancerre, a fifteen line sonnet in which the 5th, 10th, and 15th lines rhyme. The book is a dynamic journal of the year 2016, such a consequential year in our history, and the poems move with swift clarity through a range of places, scenarios, and encounters with strangers--often reflecting the life of a commuter, which Mullin is, proceeding each day via Hoboken, NJ to an office in downtown Manhattan, near the World Trade Center's pit.
There are several standouts in this book: the opening poem "At Century 21" recalls 9/11, which hovers over the present. "Lines" conveys how poems come to be. "I Nailed You" concerns a painting and its understory. I loved the swaggering rhymes and humor of "Sideman," with its allusions to pop culture and poets. "The Aggregate" describes what it was like to walk to work the morning after the 2016 election, with a killer last line that resonates with so much meaning. Hudson Tubes is a brief, devastating elegy for a father, and "The Peppers in December," with its faint echo of Williams's "This Is Just to Say," is a rueful acknowledgment of distance in marriage.
There are times in this book, as in others by this author (I own Soutine, Huncke, and Coelecanth), when the formal mastery seems...well, formal, not deeply felt or urgent, but marking time. Perhaps that is the occupational hazard of the formal poet--writing verse that is ably, even impeccably composed but somehow doesn't click into the reader's heart or mind. Hence four stars rather than five. But I commend this book to anyone who wants to read accessible, intelligent poems by a clear-eyed, sometimes satirical, sometimes haunted writer whose voice is utterly his own.
There are several standouts in this book: the opening poem "At Century 21" recalls 9/11, which hovers over the present. "Lines" conveys how poems come to be. "I Nailed You" concerns a painting and its understory. I loved the swaggering rhymes and humor of "Sideman," with its allusions to pop culture and poets. "The Aggregate" describes what it was like to walk to work the morning after the 2016 election, with a killer last line that resonates with so much meaning. Hudson Tubes is a brief, devastating elegy for a father, and "The Peppers in December," with its faint echo of Williams's "This Is Just to Say," is a rueful acknowledgment of distance in marriage.
There are times in this book, as in others by this author (I own Soutine, Huncke, and Coelecanth), when the formal mastery seems...well, formal, not deeply felt or urgent, but marking time. Perhaps that is the occupational hazard of the formal poet--writing verse that is ably, even impeccably composed but somehow doesn't click into the reader's heart or mind. Hence four stars rather than five. But I commend this book to anyone who wants to read accessible, intelligent poems by a clear-eyed, sometimes satirical, sometimes haunted writer whose voice is utterly his own.
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