Tricks of Light: New and Selected Poems by Thaddeus Rutkowski

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tricks of Light: New and Selected Poems by Thaddeus Rutkowski Amy Holman (bio) tricks of light: new and selected poems Thaddeus Rutkowski great weather for MEDIA https://www.greatweatherformedia.com/store/thaddeus-rutkowski-tricks-of-light 94 pages; Print, $18.00 There is a shifting of ground beneath the poems Thaddeus Rutkowski writes, so that they seem casual commentary while turning slightly to accommodate another meaning. Often written with disport and wit, but also discernment of worry and insult, they accumulate their tricks of light to present a clear perspective. He is, in the poems, both and neither: writer and editor, between the races, an extension and limit of vision. It would be tempting when composing one’s New and Selected to consider not only a timeline of one’s life, as he does, but also to look at the present condition of society for conversation. Where do the seventy-nine entries in Tricks of Light: New and Selected Poems fit in response to identity, economics, and family? Throughout this book, Rutkowski spots the question on people’s minds about who he is—or worse, what—and where he might belong, such as in the dentist’s chair when he muses about the appearance of fillings after being asked if his dental work was done in another country, until he settles on the underlying query: “Maybe what looks different is my face, / as if I’m from a different country.” He’s certain the dentist and his assistant don’t even know which country that could be, only that it couldn’t be theirs. Yet he is the one more curious to know, and the one with his mouth open waiting for someone else to speak. Denial of race is all too familiar, as he writes in “Where I’m From,” about the divided perspectives that brought him up in a one-street town invisible to outsiders: “I was raised as white, but I’m not white. / My father saw no difference between races, / while my mother never forgot hers.” Even in poems that point to the poet’s loneliness or stress, he can write with nonchalance that only makes me feel his suffering more. He’s not even sure if he has close friends, and he often lets relationships with them drift, shatter, and freeze. Difference outweighs likeness, targeting the unidentifiable as suspect and deeming friendship [End Page 146] implausible. As Rutkowski writes in “Nothing in Common,” he once believed he’d have more to share with anyone of color because experiences being judged or targeted would produce empathy and kinship: But I was wrong.Factors other than colorwere more important to people of colorwhen it came to being friends with me. He writes a kind of Ars Edita, if you will, at the same time as Ars Poetica, one perspective usurping the other, or joining in solidarity. “Just One Word” is both wry economy of diction—“my” versus “the”—and economics of writing life, when Rutkowski distinguishes between writing and editing text, the latter granting him a credit the former could not. To start the book with the announcement that he succeeded in writing one word that day, taking possession of the window and its limit of vision, is a smooth move into a collection about perspective and judgment. “Beyond that, it is editing my word, / not someone else’s word.” It’s his view that matters here. Rutkowski’s bicyclist poems coasting through the collection are some of my favorites for the catalog of experiences and tone of observations, and the cumulative allegory of the bicyclist as unwelcome and in between identities. Though lightweight and portable transport in reality, the bicycle is neither automobile nor pedestrian, and its rider is often disdained by driver and walker for taking up space. Clipped, battered, and cut off through several poems, the poet ignores shouts to move onto sidewalk and takes a newly paved, sticky road around a steamroller that honks at him; swerves to avoid one rider moving the wrong way, and gets his arm bruised by a taxi whose cabbie could care less; and is struck by something “soft, like a bird or a...