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Carthage
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 17, 2020
Funny, plainspoken poems that explore what it means to be "Carthage": both an Average Joe, at heart, and a president suddenly vested with godlike power to destroy whatever he wants. Beneath the war criminal, in other words, lies the beer-drinking guy who daydreams about waffles, who nevertheless has to "sort out the bad / from the evil, / a task that could give God a headache." Carthage the simple admirer of beauty would rather watch the sunset go down, but his brief moment of pause away from "loitering / in the vestibules of significance" is just as quickly interrupted by one of his aides "striding" toward him with a telephone. "'Shit,' Carthage wants to say, / 'Can't it wait till the sun goes down?'" In his world -- no, it can't.
Wormser does an excellent job of making Carthage a slightly more self-aware George W. Bush. (The book was published in 2005.)
A thoughtful pairing of the political and the quotidian, the impersonal and the personal.
Wormser does an excellent job of making Carthage a slightly more self-aware George W. Bush. (The book was published in 2005.)
A thoughtful pairing of the political and the quotidian, the impersonal and the personal.
November 26, 2011
Baron read as part of my Visiting Author's Series on 11/2/2007. This is a version of my spoken introduction for him:
Though his eye for telling detail is always present, Baron Wormser’s poems detail the experience of being, as opposed to merely observing or theorizing. He focuses in on the deceptive nature of things; how what we perceive might not be what is actually there, and how it takes courage and forbearance to accept that fact. And throughout his work is the warning against taking things for granted.
He draws unlikely, un-remarked, yet remarkable links between things, like in “A Quiet Life” where we go from a boiled egg to a persuasive argument for God. Baron’s poems finds the perfect point of exposure and show how nothing is quite random, how everything arrives in its moment at exactly the right time, for good or for ill, whether we fully understand or not.
He also, in poems like the book-length sequence of poems “Carthage,” injects acerbic humor, character assassination, really, the absurdity of the poems never reducing the disgust at the core, the poet’s power to stand back, and judge.
His subtle use of language, like the four gentle alliterations in the first four lines of “Abandoned Asylum, Northhampton, Massachusetts,” along with understated internal rhymes, and his unerring sense of when to let a line breathe, and when to ratchet up the tension. Because of this control, he is able to, in the jazz sense, take the reader “out,” with his language’s beauty, if only to bring them down, on the hard ground of simplicity and straight-forwardness.
Baron Wormser’s poems reckon mortality and loss; giving each their due, but never surrendering to despair or hopelessness.
Though his eye for telling detail is always present, Baron Wormser’s poems detail the experience of being, as opposed to merely observing or theorizing. He focuses in on the deceptive nature of things; how what we perceive might not be what is actually there, and how it takes courage and forbearance to accept that fact. And throughout his work is the warning against taking things for granted.
He draws unlikely, un-remarked, yet remarkable links between things, like in “A Quiet Life” where we go from a boiled egg to a persuasive argument for God. Baron’s poems finds the perfect point of exposure and show how nothing is quite random, how everything arrives in its moment at exactly the right time, for good or for ill, whether we fully understand or not.
He also, in poems like the book-length sequence of poems “Carthage,” injects acerbic humor, character assassination, really, the absurdity of the poems never reducing the disgust at the core, the poet’s power to stand back, and judge.
His subtle use of language, like the four gentle alliterations in the first four lines of “Abandoned Asylum, Northhampton, Massachusetts,” along with understated internal rhymes, and his unerring sense of when to let a line breathe, and when to ratchet up the tension. Because of this control, he is able to, in the jazz sense, take the reader “out,” with his language’s beauty, if only to bring them down, on the hard ground of simplicity and straight-forwardness.
Baron Wormser’s poems reckon mortality and loss; giving each their due, but never surrendering to despair or hopelessness.
January 27, 2012
Went through this quickly, I liked it, it didn't enter my heart.
I will try it again.
Poetry is a most individual of arts.
I will try it again.
Poetry is a most individual of arts.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews