Brian Teare

These are poems of place and sexual desire, of location and dislocation. They are also a conversation that the poet has with himself regarding the nature and use of prayer. That said, it is Teare’s language, more than his ideas, that shines through this collection. And the logic of the language here is one of choice rather than chance. Teare’s poetic skills are finely honed and he wields them with great precision. He has no truck with sloppiness. Perhaps sex as he describes it here can show more be messy (psychologically speaking), but craft can not. One of the tasks he seems to have set for himself is to chisel out a God-concept/location from raw materials that include Pennsylvania rivers and birch trees, hot summer days on Oakland streets, and the insistence of Eros just about everywhere. I particularly admired the long poem “Emerson Susquehanna” that opens the collection: “what began as white/ grew whiter/ by virtue of contrast/ until it seemed overexposed/ so little shadow was left/ like a sentence revised too often/ what happens is the mind/ travels outward/ because it wants to be the soul it has heard tell of.” (9). A later, reiterative poem “Sanctuary, Its Root Sanctus” also caught my attention (by reiterative, I mean that the poem repeats itself in a manner both exact and interesting): “and it is this fullness most resembles my experience of God . . . . I try to keep it here—the lake and its description—before it becomes metaphor . . . .the lake interpreted/ is no lake at all . . .being fucked is a version of prayer . . . . and birds// disturb interpretations/ I in turn have interpreted.” (61-62) show less