Modes of Recovery

Abstract

Page 28 American Book Review Modes of Recovery Danny Rivera This Clumsy Living Bob Hicok University of Pittsburgh Press http://www.upress.pitt.edu 112 pages; paper, $14.00 In his memoir Before We Get Started (2005), Bret Lott teaches us, referring to the nature of writing and the critical, absolute importance of language, that “of course words matter. Of course we must choose carefully.” It is an adherence to this valuable lesson— and to the need for the artist to exercise precision on the page—that forms the basis for literature that is worthy of multiple readings, and of repeated immersions into the texts that transform, illuminate, and broaden our understanding of the human condition. Indeed, Bob Hicok, author of the newly-released collection of poems, This Clumsy Living, is a writer who is interested in such ideals and who recognizes that every word must count—that every word must remain vital if it is to have any relevance. This heightened sense of awareness propels Hicok’s latest work, his fifth, allowing him to exact his unerring focus on all those subjects that warrant closer scrutiny, reminding the reader to reconsider events, the “little shadows” that mark daily survival, which appear inconsequential and trivial. In the process, we are forced to examine the very nature of our hidden lives, since “memory is the gap between things,” that space in which so much activity, both psychic and emotional, occurs. It is this investigation into the personal and private that informs a number of poems in This Clumsy Living (the title references a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke), a collection that finds Hicok continuing to explore wide-ranging themes with the same kind of spirited intelligence that exemplified his earlier work, but with a growing taste for the inventive; however, he is neither constrained by prevailing modes in postmodern American poetry (in the use of disjunctive phrasing, obscure referents, etc.), nor content in repeating previously visited forms. It is clear that no one model is able to contain his linguistic restlessness, a sure sign that Hicok, as a writer who continually explores one realm of poetic possibility to another, is intent on delivering meaning , and a certain refined artistry, in all contexts. In this regard, he moves with remarkable deftness between the prose-poem form, as demonstrated in the revitalized “The collector” (which originally appeared in an altered version in the Winter 2006 issue of Washington Square), and the stanzaic structure of “My faith-based initiative,” which treats the notions of absence, the cold specter of history, and time’s inertia with unflinching honesty: If I could pray, I’d have one hand of shadow and one of light, I’d be a folded thing, a voice born on wings, if I could pray, could believe the sound is the word, the word the bond, the bond the touch, the touch the promise, the promise the sky, the sky the end But the sky is pregnant with other skies, other leavings Hicok’s strengths lie in blurring the edges between the internal and external, in unraveling those subjects which resist ready definition. As seen here, Hicok’s strengths lie, beyond maintaining a strong narrative voice and a penchant for existential motifs, in blurring the edges between the internal and external, in unraveling those subjects which resist ready definition. And it can be argued, given his critical eye and a desire to interpret the smallest of experiences, that he presents us with a view of the inside-out, turning a mirror not to the metaphorical body (as it exists through time and memory) but to its most necessary, unseen components . Hicok offers us this guidance, and a world not entirely devoid of possibility and promise, because he insists on engaging the reader to the point where she must take action; there is no such thing as passivity in these poems, in these phrases that extend farther into realms of questioning than most of us would care to contemplate. The construction of this book, being more than a reflection of the writer’s aesthetic tastes, insists on a careful study regarding its making: Hicok, perhaps in an effort to highlight themes of difference...