The Vandals

by Alan Michael Parker

Poetry. Thirty years ago, when Dylan told us, 'the pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handle,' who could know they'd be reconstellated here, with all their sweet weirdness and fierce wisdom, in Alan Michael Parker's remarkable and brilliant new collection of poems-- David St. John. In this book of tresspass and insubordination, Alan Michael Parker pillages all the tints and tones of diction on his way to an outrageous, courageous new poetics ... Rather than minding their manners, his poems unhinge asthetic decorum. They exist in the synapse and spark between word and object, mind and world, where meaning takes shape. Turbulent and musical, profound and absurd, they gesture toward the universal waves of farewell-- Alice Fulton.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1999

About the author

Alan Michael Parker is the author of eight books of poems, four novels, and editor of five reference works on poetry. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in journals. Parker teaches at Davidson College, where he is Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English, and in the University of Tampa low-residency M.F.A. program. His awards include three Pushcart Prizes, the 2013 and 2014 Randall Jarrell Award, the North Carolina Book Award, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this ambitious work, Alan Michael Parker attempts to give voice to all the malevolent forces that we, as readers, are drawn to, but at the same time repel in real life. In order to achieve this, Parker employs a technique I encountered earlier in Lynn Emanuel’s work: blurring the line between poet and audience. Throughout the collection, the author addresses himself and the reader as witnesses to the vandals actions against society. It also, subversively, puts society on the outside and the vandals on the inside, for once. These techniques work best when he is exploring acts that in reality would be forbidden, but in the space of the poems “threatens neither you [the reader] nor me [the writer]” (45). For me, these clever poems fail when the subject matter becomes monotonous (the vandals commit endless crimes and loiter everywhere), and the trick of the narrative has already been discovered. Yet, overall, the collection is exciting enough to be worth the time.

[Dylan Gallop · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some darn good poetry.