John Latta
Breeze
University of Notre Dame Press
2003
136 pages
Softcover, $16



Wearing his intelligence disarmingly, John Latta writes poems that mix scholarly interests—referencing Robert Duncan here, Cicero there—with personal stories, amid quite a bit of seasonal weather, strolls through nature. His jocular, unpretentious tone may be his large calling card, which is sort of a combination of a comic with a brain and a peaceful mind, sometimes aggravated, curious about life and literature.

Latta seems to enjoy, in general, the sounds of words, especially awkward, playfully colloquial or unconventional ones, like ‘landlubber’, ‘hullabaloo’, ‘spaetzle’, ‘harlequinade’, just to name a few. Anyone who has read his weblog, Hotel Point, is already aware of his whimsical, mockingly old-fashioned task-taking with past-tense verbs, which he snips the ‘e’ of, as in golf’d, for instance. This opens up the work from the scholarly pursuits in his weblog and invites in a relaxed atmosphere, due to the contraction—contractions’re how we speak. Latta seems especially aware of the artifice that reflection—the language used when reflecting—can bring to writing. And while the snipped ‘e’ fixation seems bound to his weblog only, Latta’s un-fussy voice, its modulations in the poems, works in the same way.

Most of Breeze is written in unrhymed triplets, the poems usually a full page or a page and a half long. Here’s his poem "Herb and Violet":


Two characters and only one represents anything
The way a Bildungsroman gets built
Like a boat in a cellar with all the attendant axieties

About getting it out the door, up
The stairs, down the twisty path to the beach.
A dire little exercise in spatial relationships, it

Causes time to drop away, though
Reading back over it you notice time is built
Into the mere grammar or is there hugging the path

Where stones mark out beds of lovage and nasturtium,
Coriander and a dwarf lavender common to the higher climes
Of Galicia, in northern Spain.

I’m not feeling much of anything today, I’m not
Felling like much of anything. Not like that blue pebble
In beak of yon grackle, not like that tousle

Of peony that keeps banging itself against the sunlit entrance
To a regular cave, not like that alarming white
Horse standing in for whatever patch of sky I can make out

Up through all the surrounding encumbrances.
I’m not feeling like the purple sage a sage grows
Merely by saying the lines of a long domestic saga

About Herb, About Violet, about the boating accident
That led to such grumpy characterizations only such a tale
Itself can limn and only if you too

Happen to be stuck in a cellar empty of everything but sawdust,
A sign that the construction entails reduction,
Leavings you can count on to help any garden grow.

You sweep it all into a pail, feeling
Like you might as well accomplish one little thing today,
And dump it around the herbs, dump it around the violets.

*

Normally I cringe when reading names of flowers, plant growth, in poems, as I’m expecting the poem to turn into a pretty doily pattern of sentimental gibberish. But Latta’s work demonstrates a genuine interest in nature—one only needs to read his weblog to understand this, as he’s continually speaking of different birds he’s seen recently, what the weather is like, or just mentioning what he sees outside. I think of Mary Oliver’s poems in this way as well. That is, the flowers/plants do more work than just sit there, asking to be gazed at—they are images secondarily, or so it seems to me, and act as guides for specificity, wherein localization or more singular poetry occurs.

There is meta-speech throughout the book, wherein the author seemingly drops in, as in the above line’s "I’m not feeling like the purple sage a sage grows/Merely by saying the lines of a long domestic saga//About Herb, About Violet." One of the points of the author dropping in is often to break down the comfort of the fiction of the poem. In a poem titled "Requiem for a Writing," he more than suggests this concern with the positioning of the opening line and the break of it:


What if all writing lies


Yet he adds, teasingly it seems, the more conventional clarity in the second line, connecting the subject (writing) to:


In the blue-note syncopations, the slurry


And then he continues:


margins of the experiential


*

The experiential in Latta’s poems is often haunted with a little sadness. It’s not the kind that comes up and attaches itself to you, in a cloying way. Rather, it’s a delicate acknowledgment, like a breeze out of nowhere, and then it moves on, and leaves the reader alone again. But the movement is memorable, and may be part of the reason why one wants to read further in the book, in the hopes of finding some answers for or of one’s self/selves, following someone older, perhaps a bit long in the tooth. But Latta wouldn’t want to show you something only he sees. ‘Come here’, he says in "Futility and Caprice in Yellow and Red," ‘Look for yourself’.

The Maximus Poems now read. Beautiful writing, colloquial, pierced through with Spirit. Olson could certainly sing:


I live underneath
the light of day

I am a stone
or the ground beneath

My life is buried,
with all sorts of passages
both on the sides and on the face turned down
to the earth
or built out as long gifted generous northeastern Connecticut stone walls are
through which 18th century roads still pass
as though they themselves were realms

I began a new job this week, with more hours, so my time to review books has lessened. As well, I have a lot of other commitments in October, so things may be a bit slow around here for the next month.