THE MAN IN THE BOOTH IN THE MIDTOWN TUNNEL. By Doug Holder. 2008. 63 pages. $13 Cervena Barva Press. POBOX 440357 W. Somerville, Mass. 02144-3222 http://www.cervenabarvapress.com/

Reviewed by Don Winter

  Rather than puzzle poems the reader must pick to find meaning, Doug Holder presents crystal portraits filled with small details that resonate more and more with repeated readings:

Postal Worker

The supervisor

Counts the seconds

As you wipe

The Crumbs from your

Face and return

To your post.

Your hands

Anonymous

Callused, pedestrian

You feed

A rapid

Stream of letters

To a ravenous federal machine.

Your eyes dimmed

For years

From the sea of manila

The bland white face

Of the mail

Facesscarred

With zips.

You feel

Ready to

Be returned to

Your sender.

Holder often aligns himself with those emblematic and beneath notice, voicing experience as a tollbooth attendant, a heroin addict, and a psychiatric patient. And often the poetry is the response to the desolation and the ominous surroundings that engulf characters. When characters aren't anticipating some form of anxiety ("You felt/It press/Again/In your/Stomach"), they are displaced, or home retreats. "She could never run that way again," a voice admits in "For Sarah," and in "The Family Portrait" we are told, "Nothing will last."

But while this is book is about loss and anguish and darkness, it is also about hope:

"A daily ritual

Of decrepit defiance

Walking the ground

That will own them."

  (Cambridge, Mass: Two Old Women," p.26)

What may in fact be best about this book is the way the poetry oscillates between the chaotic and the organized, the terrifying and the peaceful. Holder's is a voice both comfortable and uncomfortable with itself, a voice that allows both the catastrophic and beautiful to co-exist harmoniously. As the speaker in "The Last Hotdog," suggests, bad things are happening, with worse on the way, but we can find small moments of (mitigated) joy even where hope is no longer possible:

She brought it

To his sick bed,

He bit through

The red casing

The familiar orgasm of juice

Hitting the roof

Of his mouth

In some facsimile

Of his youth.

Holder takes the grit of everyday life and transforms it into elegant, generous and personal poems, as easy to read as a pop novel, as fulfilling as a hearty meal. "The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel," is the type of book that might bridge the aesthetic gap between popular culture, which often does not acknowledge the existence of the fine arts, and the usually snobbish intelligentsia, which rarely acknowledges the existence of popular culture.

----Don Winter's work has appeared in the:  New York Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, 5 AM, Passages North, Slipstream, Portland Review, Chiron Review, Sycamore Review, Pearl, and close to 500 other journals in the U.S., Canada, England, Australia, Switzerland, Scotland and Ireland. His work has been nominated for twelve Pushcarts. His first collection, Things About to Disappear, is the best seller at Bone World Publishing and in New York Quarterly's on-line store. He is co-founder of Platonic 3Way Press, home of Fight These Bastards

Deep Calls unto Deep

When you undertake the search for what is not within your grasp, what urges you forward? Will you know when you feel it, when you hear it, or will you know it when you see it?

When you have a burden; and you long to share this, unless you prick it with a dart of love, it will erupt into a wash out, neither satisfying your intent nor the recipient's thirst.

Thus not only are you both longing, more importantly neither has succumbed to the call of;  "deep calls unto deep."

To be drowned, and to die of thirst, are deaths widely different; yet water is the cause of both; abundance destroys in one case, and want in the other. So here the fullness of grace stills the activity of self; and therefore it is of the utmost importance to remain as silent as possible and listen with the ear of your heart.

When you search, do you have thecorrect tools; not the "right tools," the correct tools.  You indeed must hear that still and small voice, which reminds us all to come in and take a rest, to refresh and reconnect ourselves; not "reconnect with ourselves."

Once there, what shall you do? What shall you satisfy first? The answer once again is wait, for "deep calls unto deep."  This inward "knowing," is the voice that you need to hear and tune out all others. It is the same as how a mother, who can so quickly identify her newborn's cry over the myriad of others; for "deep calls unto deep." 

When you are there, you will know? This is because your five sense will not render their support, nor will your recollection and a quick wit, be capable to survey the area and relay understanding.  Note: as you build your ladder of ascension, the higher you build, just as deep must the base be. You cannot ascend when you have not dug deep within yourself clearing the space for a strong footing.

Remember: Deep calls unto deep! The source is equal to the means by which the ends are alike.

Peace,

Bro. Smith SGS