{"id":805,"date":"2013-11-11T18:20:53","date_gmt":"2013-11-11T18:20:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/?p=805"},"modified":"2015-05-23T23:34:10","modified_gmt":"2015-05-23T23:34:10","slug":"review-no-hurry-by-michael-blumenthal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/2013\/11\/review-no-hurry-by-michael-blumenthal\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: No Hurry by Michael Blumenthal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Blumenthal\u2019s No Hurry: Poems 2000-2012<\/em>. Wilkes-Barre: Etruscan Press. 2012. Review by Stephen Massimilla<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In No Hurry, Michael Blumenthal reaffirms that powerful poetry can be accessible and complex at once. The poet is in the autumn of life, in \u201cno hurry\u201d: careful not overlook everyday pleasures or even to skirt painful realities. As a wisdom poet, he rejects quick fixes. Though he pays homage to such heroes as Tennyson, Yeats, James, Bishop, and Larkin, Blumenthal also eschews bookish allusions and tonal affectation. As in the past, Blumenthal addresses us as \u201cfriends,\u201d as if we were being given access to the poet\u2019s complex conversations with himself.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Blumenthal continually reminds us that honesty is a complicated challenge. The speaker of the first poem in the collection takes an unflinching look into a dominatrix\u2019s chamber in the Atelier Rhinegold, a room from which a client can exit into\u00a0 \u201ca world \/ made whole again for a fee, \/ a kindly universe where there\u2019s a cure \/ for every unlived fantasy a life provides.\u201d Only a skeptical and courageous writer could even begin to treat\u2014or at least diagnose\u2014the conditions of life in our frustrating, ailing world, given that even a temporary \u201ccure\u201d provided \u201cfor a fee\u201d is a masochistic fantasy. By opening his book with such an unexpected \u201cexit,\u201d Blumenthal signals that he will not favor factitious comedic endings. In \u201cThe Rabbi Prepares a Wedding Poem,\u201d Blumenthal identifies the rabbi as \u201cduty bound to all that can be recited \/ from a podium,\u201d which precludes even mentioning the \u201cdangerous\u201d facts. In another poem, the poet suggests that it is better to admit that even the nightingale must at times sing \u201calone\u201d and\u00a0 \u201cin praise of deceitfulness\u201d and \u201cimpossible love\u201d (\u201cBecause Marriage Is Not for Romantics\u201d). The tone here is both down-to-earth and wistful, both biting and tinged with unfulfilled longing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Indeed, much of what Blumenthal reveals can be communicated only through his complex tone. Notice how the speaker of \u201cBackground Music\u201d undercuts what the opening line\u2014\u201cIf you are lucky in love\u201d\u2014would lead us to expect: \u201cIf you are lucky in love \/ someone will become the background music \/ to your own life \/\/ listened to but not actually heard\u2026.\u201d What an effectively indirect way of suggesting that the speaker is culpable of having overlooked his loved one\u2019s needs, \u201cas if the music were playing in another room.\u201d An alternative to oblique self-indictment could have involved ignoring or denying his own self-absorption, or perhaps confessing his perceived failings outright; but, as we are warned in the villanelle \u201cLe Choix,\u201d the choice between dying and lying \u201cis always painful, and unclear.\u201d When it comes to questions of frankness and deception, sexual desire and love, one\u2019s own needs and another\u2019s, there is no easy shortcut to bearable honesty.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Besides the earned honesty and tonal mastery of his poetry itself, what in this troubled world does the poet give us to celebrate? I\u2019m tempted to say that Blumenthal would not entirely disagree with Rilke about the poet\u2019s duty to praise and bless whatever he can\u2014provided, Blumenthal might add, that this praise is often drowned in bitterness.\u00a0 \u201cI know that wherever we find beauty needs to be praised,\u201d the poet asserts early on, only then to tell us that one \u201cbeauty\u201d in question was a young Jewish woman being admired by the Nazi soldier who was pushing her into the gas chamber (\u201cA Photo of Terezin\u201d). If \u201cGrace may not be merited, \/ friends, but nonetheless deserves to be praised,\u201d how confidently are we to sing the world\u2019s praises in the midst of injustice? (\u201cBlessed\u201d). And in a book that refers to the global economic downturn and all kinds of personal losses, only Blumenthal could coin phrases like \u201cthe blessed burdens of our disenfranchisements\u201d and \u201cthe sense of our own sinfulness.\u201d (\u201cNot the Soul\u201d).\u00a0 In \u201cThe Human Condition,\u201d the poet\u2019s \u201cbethren of the mid-range,\u201d those likewise facing aging and death, are, Blumenthal suggests, still free to celebrate \u201cbirdsong and the wild graffiti \/ of the everyday,\u201d along with the blessings of the \u201cnext\u201d life. That next life (like this life), after all, is \u201cthere for the asking like the garbage, \/ just waiting to be taken away.\u201d For a seasoned Jewish writer with a distrust of claims to the romantic and the transcendent, what could be more \u201ceveryday\u201d than this birdsong graffiti and that afterlife garbage?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Given the complex uniqueness of his oeuvre and voice, Blumenthal not only helps us to face bitter realities: he also practices kindness and compassion, and he can be hysterically funny. Imparted with music as buoyant and lovely as it is turbulent, what comes through, in spite of everything, is the poet\u2019s bigheartedness and unabashed willingness to investigate. In a moving tribute, Blumenthal expresses gratitude for all he has learned from his various relatives in and through their struggles, strategies, and sufferings (\u201cGenetics\u201d); and he is both touching and wittily satiric in his honorary dirge to a pigeon that perished because it was perhaps \u201cas bored of false praise as I was\u201d (\u201cThe Pigeon\u201d). Most appositely, Blumenthal adopts a tone at once quirky, enchantingly lyrical, and profound in his praise of \u201cmoles,\u201d those scribblers persistently digging, mining the subconscious dark of the writer\u2019s mind (\u201cMoles\u201d). The unhurried product of that pursuit is a productively troubling book, a multifaceted statement of courage, of moral and aesthetic purpose. It is in this spirit that, at the end of \u201cSelf-Help,\u201d the poet urges us to speak out so that:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the books that once gave us so much bad feeling<\/p>\n

toward our happier selves can go on doing their work<\/p>\n

in the deeply literate darkness underground.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Blumenthal\u2019s No Hurry: Poems 2000-2012. Wilkes-Barre: Etruscan Press. 2012. Review by Stephen Massimilla   In No Hurry, Michael Blumenthal reaffirms that powerful poetry can be accessible and complex at once. The poet is in the autumn of life, in \u201cno hurry\u201d: careful not overlook everyday pleasures or even to skirt painful realities. As a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=805"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1018,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805\/revisions\/1018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}