Elegy Owed
Words have weight in Hicok’s poems. They feel nailed in place, and the meter hits like the sure pounding of a hammer. Yet as heft, muscle, and precision draw you forward, Hicok evokes not solidity but, rather, shifting ground, flux, metamorphosis, and, most arrestingly, most unnervingly, death. In his seventh collection, Hicok builds startling images out of the everyday and the surreal, the comic and the sorrowful. Avoiding abstraction and pretension (one particularly teasing poem is titled “Knockturn”), he cleaves to earth, skin, breath. He describes odd, private rituals involving attempts to reassemble shards and stop time. His variations on the elegy can be haunting, romantic, and bracingly irreverent. “Elegy to hunger” begins, “There’s a strain of cannibalism / I admire.” Intimate lyrics of love, fear, loss, and cosmic perplexity are matched by robust dissections and protests. Hicok’s mordant view of our doomed consumer culture in “Obituary for the middle class” is balanced by his gruffly tender objection to the word inanimate, “Steel’s got a pulse / as far as I’m concerned.” This trenchant collection’s got heart and soul. --Donna Seaman