Quill and Quire

REVIEWS

« Back to
Book Reviews

Holding Pattern

by Shane Rhodes

This second poetry collection from Shane Rhodes takes a good long look at dualities. A selective list of the themes covered (and uncovered) in Holding Pattern might include memory and experience, science and religion, heterosexual and homosexual love, intellect and emotion, the intangible and the physical. Rhodes is under 30, yet his work implies a breadth of knowledge and an intimacy with time that older poets would envy.

The book is neatly quartered: first, longer poems showcase supple language that consistently bends emotions into sensations. Describing a war veteran’s attachment to his “souvenir” Nazi belt buckles, Rhodes writes, “He must have touched these every day/as if memory were a muscle/kept strong by use.” The metaphors arrive so effortlessly it sometimes feels as if Rhodes thinks in lyric poetry as others think in their first language: “The scent of night flowering cactus/walks through the room as we sleep/while some cat coagulates darkness/and begins a private life.”

The collection’s second section adds dashes of wit and literary allusion to the metaphors. This series of shorter poems evoking the elusiveness of love combines references to Kafka and Coleridge with intensely private recollections that crack the poetry’s cerebral surface: “sex moved through our cells like heat from an acid etch.”

Rhodes’ vocal limberness, stretching his voice in various directions, combining plaintive and sardonic tones in one poem, reaches fulfillment in the book’s final section. A long meditation on the end of an affair, this section is so (effectively) riddled with footnotes that it half-reads as a send up of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Each line represents a facetious command issued by the speaker to himself in order to cope with his heartbreak: “visit the zoo and attempt releasing bats. If unsuccessful, return home and reread The Hairy Ape.” Every once in a while sincerity melts the sarcastic veneer, and the contrast almost makes you wince in empathy.

At times the expressive temperature rises so high that the poems backfire. Sentiment occasionally oozes through treacly abstractions: “The night held by such description. It/fans out over the abyss where it burns/and shines. Burns and shines.” Such a flaw, however, may add to Rhodes’ potential: as they say, better for a young poet to have felt strongly, and waded occasionally into cliché, than never to have felt at all.

 

Reviewer: Jana Prikryl

Publisher: NeWest Press

DETAILS

Price: $14.95

Page Count: 96 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-896300-60-X

Released: Mar.

Issue Date: 2002-3

Categories: Poetry