69. Poesie interessanter als Fernsehn

Kleinzahler might be considered a postmodern metaphysical poet. He makes a complex cognitive music, his poems often sprung from a conceit deftly played out: “A Beautiful Mind“ undoes the feel-good inanity of the movie, enacting instead a vivid brain-surgery fantasia (“You can imagine the mess / and attendant motor disturbance“). In “The Hereafter“ the newly dead poet gets a private screening of his life: “A 20-million-dollar home movie it is. . . . What a lot of erections, voidings, pretzels, / bouncing the ball against the stoop. / She really did love you, all along.“ Hell is not, it would seem, other people.
For all their dazzle, these poems do not ask you to like them. They are a free — albeit occasionally dyspeptic — offering, arising from a commitment to track “How thus the Streaming Familiar / Is made to transfigure / Magick’d in the Candle’s Glow.“ The poet’s humor is sometimes whimsical, often elegiac and intermittently quite savage, particularly in his epistle-poems, modeled ingeniously after Horace. / Maureen N. Mclane, NYT*) 22.2.04

THE STRANGE HOURS TRAVELERS KEEP
By August Kleinzahler.
98 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $22.

Hier*) eine umfangreiche Leseprobe aus dem besprochenen Band.