David Berman
Actual Air
Open City: $12.95, 94 pp.
David Berman writes the detached and snide with sublime strokes of diffidence, toying with his readers continually via weird and contorted views of the Everyday and mundane. Just the right type of innocuous jerk to freshen the current state of American poetry, he can seem slick as a canal-rat in poems like "World: Series," whose harmless, insomniac protagonist makes "note[s] on a pad kept by the window" when "something passes in the dark;" he can seem nostalgic in a way that both derides and celebrates our collective fascination with gaudiness and material contraption as in "Virginia Mines":
We passed the mortgaged colonialsBerman is able to relay his imagination through registers other than freeze-dried-irony, however. In the temp hell of "The New Idea," for instance, Berman solemnly confides "[i]t would be difficult to admit that no one / ushered me as a blip onto this cold grid," and coolly berates fate ("no one asked me to design my life") in the same tepid sigh. The poem's "crumpled secretary," who vigils the ashes of her dead bulldog in a "thermos on her desk," shares the same fate as the Chairman, who sleeps "in a Chinese stream / arms like slackened chain / in the puttering current." Here's but one of many scenes of pathos, captivity and sterility in Actual Air that are also (paradoxically) humorous yet poignant.
in the year trees reached the attic.
We saw "Moon over Woolite Bottle"
and the grand robot portraits...
We were strangers without suitcases
trying to make you remember us,
painting "black object with red splotch."
To be sure, everyone and anyone are caught in the sights of Berman's marksman eye, an eye out to define and revisit the late-twentieth-century American landscape. But Berman's a poet who also takes aim at his own startling inanities, as in "Cassette County":
...into this street-legal nonfiction,Sitting center stage in the jumble, the fiasco that is Berman's world of "misc. Americana," the reader never feels incrimminated or forced to take sides, and should most likely enjoy the promontory the poet has built from which to view this world, one of "66% Then and 33% now."
into this good world,
this warm place
that I love with all my heart,
anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship.
- Yago Cura