Home
The Glass Book (Ekstasis $14.95)
Tim Lander's first commercial publication, The Glass Book (Ekstasis $14.95), is a welcome event, recalling in its poems and design an earlier age when City Lights and New Directions published Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. Lander is neither as rhetorical or incantatory as Ginsberg nor as witty and urbane as Felinghetti, but he has his own quiet, intimate, celebratory mode, untouched by the need for closure, theatrics or metaphorical complexity.
Despite the casual, whimsical tone, Lander's poems often throw up surprising constructions, such as "the sea is so greenly proud";, though these oases are too often undermined by abstractions and disconcerting shifts in diction and banal constructions (i.e. "lacking comprehension";).
While his long poems often ramble, Lander's shorter lyrics-where he celebrates the woodlouse and the earwig, the seasons, lost friends, and the smell of jasmine in the wind-strike a firmer note. I'm thinking of 'Picture Postcards of Desire' and 'I'll go down to the Sally Ann', where, in the face of death, the poet confesses "It is impossible to write anything important"; beyond acknowledging that "in that ordinary apartment / there suddenly was an absence.";
Naked and scribbling in a café, the poet proposes a trip to the Sally Ann "to pick out another suit of clothes / to mock myself in last year's fashions."; Lander's self-mocking stance, including deliberate misspelling, is, in the face of so much political and aesthetic posturing, endearing. 1-896860-62-1. By Gary Geddes.
[BCBW 2000]
Despite the casual, whimsical tone, Lander's poems often throw up surprising constructions, such as "the sea is so greenly proud";, though these oases are too often undermined by abstractions and disconcerting shifts in diction and banal constructions (i.e. "lacking comprehension";).
While his long poems often ramble, Lander's shorter lyrics-where he celebrates the woodlouse and the earwig, the seasons, lost friends, and the smell of jasmine in the wind-strike a firmer note. I'm thinking of 'Picture Postcards of Desire' and 'I'll go down to the Sally Ann', where, in the face of death, the poet confesses "It is impossible to write anything important"; beyond acknowledging that "in that ordinary apartment / there suddenly was an absence.";
Naked and scribbling in a café, the poet proposes a trip to the Sally Ann "to pick out another suit of clothes / to mock myself in last year's fashions."; Lander's self-mocking stance, including deliberate misspelling, is, in the face of so much political and aesthetic posturing, endearing. 1-896860-62-1. By Gary Geddes.
[BCBW 2000]
Submitted on July 11, 2003 in By David.
