Adventures Of A Seething Virgil Originally published in LitRag, I think, in 2003. Field Recordings poems by Ed Skoog Like an impossibly excellent pawnshop from a dream, Ed Skoog’s new chapbook, Field Recordings, appears to lay out its wares with casual insouciance, as if without any forethought at all, only to gradually reveal itself as a meticulously catalogued gallery of treasures. The book, nine poems short, rambles through time, place, and identity with a sort of highly discriminating lunacy that I can only describe as infectious, in language that is by turns archaic and colloquial, grandiose and self-effacing, obtuse and direct. It would be maddening if it weren’t such a blast. “Only the shape I arrived in is left,” begins “Pilgrim: An Ode,” the first of three long poems and the book’s opener, neatly cutting a hole in the fabric of the book that the poet will make no move to repair. Instead he’ll describe the hole, tossing in scraps of the world, pulling out clues to the speaker’s identity, inviting the reader to bask in his indeterminate self, to come along for the ride. “Pilgrim” straddles the line between manifesto and prayer, interweaving chance encounter and personal declaration into a heady rant; our speaker, a seething Virgil, shouts over his shoulder without looking to see if we’re following, because he is so confident that we are: Half of you, who love me, will deceive my lover on our journey over hillocks, river levees, valley tightropes, castle moats and also, even sleeping, photo album pages flip your wintry bridges. Skoog links clauses together in the most surprising ways, letting words (here, “flip”) do double-duty, animating two separate images. Elsewhere, as in “More About the Hurricane,” he mixes metaphors with gleeful abandon: “The angles of the pepper-branches / and the torn leaves touring colonnades of air / can be measured in millibars of good luck.” But that poem, a quasi-imagist homage to Richard Hugo (channeling the Montana poet, the first line offers, “Say the rain rides in from the west”), remains grounded in its regard for what it sees, no matter how distorted, ending with a sunset that “turns like dimples / in solid glass” over a drowned landscape, “throwing a flash of moon inside each wave.” The chapbook’s title comes from the second long poem, “Loops,” an extended cogitation that lashes past and present together with the lonely endurance of physical places. “The people are the places and the things are / made muzzy by the muted pester / of noontide music videos and urbanism,” it begins, with the speaker wearily stopping home in the middle of a workday to listen and think. The word “urbanism” here is unapologetically dorky, an intentional awkwardness that invites us to entertain the links between Atari and Wuthering Heights, between a naked sprint through weeds and an graceless kiss in the dark. These are the poet’s field recordings, his incidental observations, which evoke a momentary intersection of thought and experience. “I have always hewed to that music / made from gentle modifications,” he writes, and allows us to listen to those modifications, in relative quiet, with occasional editorial asides. “Parish Chatter” continues in this vein; it’s a cleverly arranged collage of voices in which the serendipities of overheard speech are allowed to drift into sonic and thematic clots. “He’s a waist forty-three, twenty-four / hours a day. She’s on my shit / list for buying all new tires,” goes a typical riff, lousy with hilarious enjambments; elsewhere the poet rhymes “boats,” “votes,” and “dotes” like a six-year-old, letting the words fall together accidentally on purpose. “Lament,” on the other hand, transforms nonsense into elegy: “Night was a battleship’s shadow. / Hours flew into moths. / Bombers got mixed up / in the ornamental iron / of the Apartments Pontalba. / Cold laundry blew.” In a kind of funereal chant, elusive visions stack themselves up like broken tombstones. “Moonlighters,” a gloss on a part-time job, offers a bit of levity which nonetheless oozes loneliness: “I asked Terry / for time off. He scratched his beard / okay. We drove around the lake, / listened to a game on radio.” The company of others defaults to desolation. The earlier “In Snow” is similarly desolate; the speaker, feeding birds in winter, envies the unity and purpose of some church-bound Mormons, while “I had only that dusting away of white, / that setting-out seed for no harvest.” It is only in the final poem, “Plein Air,” that our speaker reveals his struggle for full consciousness, and his despair at his failure to achieve it: When I am without the total mind I have touched the edge of like a ship’s iron, and I a drowning man, always drowning; and when I am thick with world and have never been naked in a storm; when I am a submersible; when I am inundated by the great pour of waterfalls; sunk; or dissipate in altitude: then I strive to get as low as a desert toad, or an untouchable, there I am wood sawed and tugged in Milltown; I am the sawyer; and the egret at the edge of the marsh spears me; I am rocks at the bottom of the sea. Only in becoming what he sees can the speaker soothe himself; the observation and interpretation of experience, the arrangement of words on the page: that is the cure. “Being is my day job,” he quips late in the poem, but he’s a poet at night, and it’s what makes the day job worth doing. We ought to be glad he’s doing it. Skoog is a superb poet, in love with the world and the words that describe it. I could choose almost any stanza to illustrate this, but I’ll pick my favorite one in the book, seven perfect lines from “Loops”: Big shot walks up his hat atilt, a knife fight in his instep, starts laying it on about some dough promised him and soon to arrive then the sky lets go and falters into the gutters, lobs a few grenades against the barn, flash and pop, and the air smells like cat. There’s more where that came from, enough for a dozen collections of poetry. Luckily you’ve got it all here in this little book. “The dinner rush / sings headache,” Skoog moans in the book’s final lines, “but I struggle apron forward / to bear your strange dinner.” What are you waiting for, pilgrim? Dig in. c2003 by J. Robert Lennon.