Undoing
Poems bring pleasurable experiences UNDOING By: James Cihlar. Publisher: Little Pear Press, 86 pages, $15 One dark, one playful, two collections from Twin Cities poets make reading poetry fun. By RYAN VINE, Special to the Star Tribune Last update: May 29, 2009 - 4:16 PM If the poems in Gibson's book are pleasurable for their torque and verve, the poems in James Cihlar's debut collection, Undoing, are pleasurable for their drama, that inherent drama that comes with a well-crafted narrative. The book comes together (like the individual poems) largely thanks to a cast of characters and the tension their relationships create. In the first few pages we meet Aunt Dolores, Mrs. Ferguson and Grandma Carol, among others. He establishes these relationships in the poems, only to destroy them. He sets these characters up, then tears them from us. Appealing to our darker natures, Cihlar focuses on the violence creeping here. We encounter in spare poems of only 16 lines (often the lines are only one to two words long) the breaking of the author's parents' relationship. In the unraveling we find Pall Malls, Seagram's 7, Rage,Fists, [a] Pot of chili [my stepmother] flung on the wall / of my mother's apartment. These poems, quite intentionally, are composed of fragments. One gets the feeling that without the structure the poems provide, without these stories, the whole thing would fly apart. It's in this unraveling, though, that Cihlar learns to ask the important questions: What do we use to survive? What tells us where to go? What comes after? / I'll always be circling back. And it's in this circling back that the reader finds his pleasure. He's sure to stick around to see what comes next, what's next to come undone. --Star Tribune, Minneapolis-St. Paul, MinnesotaJames Cihlar, UNDOING (Little Pear Press, Seekonk, MA, 2008) by Michele F. Cooper James Cihlar, who lives and writes in Minnesota, has published a winsome book of poems sprinkled with prose poems. The title, UNDOING (2008, 86 pages), signals coming apart, loss, and breakage, but the poet finds very clever ways of literally putting the pieces together in this interesting investigation of relationships.  There are various undoings behind the wonderful title (captured decisively in the cover collage), and some of the poet s examples are imaginative and observant: broken relationships, thrift shop objects separated from their owners, deaths, his mom s drinking keeping her from herself and her son, estranged relatives, and more. The theme is exercised well.  The first poem, The House Made of Words, is elegant and opens doors both aesthetic and intellectual on the themes of being a poet, losing his father, searching for relationships, and trying to define the concept of home and his call to words. Like many others poems in this collection, it is well worth reading more than once, tying head and heart with strong cord as he does throughout the book. Here are the last two stanzas: When my father left for good the words spilled like ink off the edges of the paper. It would be years before I began to pick them up and lay them in a line. Someone s got to do it, shake the moment by the collar and say, Learn. The second poem, Lessons, includes father, mother, brother, sisters, and first love (though fully clothed) away at college. Of course there will be lessons after the final line cautions both reader and poet to learn. This is how poems are strung together inside the line that forms the book.. Poem 3, father; poem 4, Aunt Dolores, and so on. After the opening, and certainly after three or four of the poems that follow directly, I was caught, and Cihlar s charm and insights carried me right through the book, which never lost its sense of unity. Good surprises keep the book interesting. In Poetry City, there is such fresh imagery when  the car cradles us, shudders with music, and we slide down the black tongue of the city. In Under the Bed, surreal images invade an otherwise ordinary universe, however cleverly evoked (I liked the nail-head stars, the carousel horse breaking free) of locks, rainbow nets, and wallpaper, when the wallpaper is themed map-of-the-world with each continent a cartoon character: blue Asia loom protectively, orange Europe a grandmother s face, to ward off the long, skinny green hand coming up from the heat register. Another convention sown throughout is the list poems: What My Father Did Not Use (Windsor knot, benefit of the Doubt), What My Father Used (glove box, Polaroid, his and hers affairs, etc.), What My Mother [or Stepmother] Used, What My Ex Used, What I Used. The lists strike an amusing note in every instance though the poignancy regarding violence, neediness, and upheaval may last longer for the reader. But then, as the poet writes in Trading Spaces, Sometimes a little upheaval is good for a Life.  The book as a whole is a layering of self-searching and explanation, and we are eventually introduced to a global and faceted picture of an I-character, presumably speaking for Cihlar, involved with his insides and outsides. As one might expect, this includes his consciousness as a poet, and I think poets will especially appreciate his insights into the creative process and how it bubbles up even when the mind doesn t want to participate, as in these two lines from Expedition : I didn t want to write this poem, but a taste of yours made me. The theme of undoing shows up in Twin Cities with a reminder that things can change or be made to change, and that some undoings can be --Michele Cooper, poet, author of Posting the Watch