Hiding from Salesmen: Poems
Experiencing Scott Poole’s poems is like visiting inside the human brain. His words pulse with electric life, and carry the reader on a torrent of wonderful energy to encounter marvel after marvel. A narrator grows corn inside his garage, another person bounces basketballs off a Rodin sculpture, a man sticks his foot into a coal mine on a Spring day permitting hundreds of tiny miners to escape.A sensitivity quivering with the terror and joy of existence inhabits this poetry. A man temporarily abandons replacing a broken automobile starter to savor "the perfection of babies." Another realizes that living beings posses a power such "that death / can’t completely inhabit the body." Poole’s words would convince anyone that our species will endure and triumph. Humorous, thoughtful, and vibrating with magic, the poems of Hiding from Salesmen are simultaneously vehicle, idea, organic compound and music. The future of poetry—hey, the future of humanity—is in good hands if it’s in Scott Poole’s hands."— Tom WaymanScott Poole’s poems are witty, terse, irreverent, sad, and, mostly, totally unexpected. Hiding from Salesmen—such a great title—signals, accurately, original, delightful."— Diana O’HehirIt would be simple enough if all Poole were interested in was comic resistance to certain death-pulls in our culture. Instead, his speaker—a husband, a father, someone grateful for "reality’s green backyard"—looks everywhere for signs of nobility and magic in human life. He finds it at a girl’s soccer game, at the river’s edge where lovers meet for picnics, at the scene of a terrorist attack. Under the beam of an MRI, the huge machine circling round him, "I let it register my love of baseball, / the friend I saved from drowning. . . / And I hoped / something greater than me / might show up on the screen." Just as the instrument searches within, the poems in Poole’s book look out, tracking what is beautiful, useful, and true.— Richard Robbins