'A Flight to Elsewhere' by Samuel Hazo
Share with others:
Samuel Hazo, Pennsylvania's first and only state poet (1993-2003) and founder of Pittsburgh's International Poetry Forum, once told an interviewer, "Ink is an intoxicating beverage."
 Â
 By Samuel Hazo
Autumn House Press $24.95
 To judge by his prodigious output -- more than 30 -- the septuagenarian Hazo has been a dipsomaniac for decades.
But like all consummate drinkers and prolific authors, Hazo has had his share of ups and downs. "A Flight to Elsewhere," his 18th collection of poems, unfortunately veers toward the latter. It's didactic and too transparently rhetorical.
The first section of the uninspiring "Welcome to New York," for instance, records a June 2001 placid visit to the World Trade Center site. A sparrow is seen:
"She fluffs and shudders dry/like a dog after a dousing."
The urban pastoral dissolves in the poem's second half, written on first anniversary of the attack, as Hazo remembers an animate, widening gyre of debris:
the flying snow of faxes,
memoranda, jiffy notes --
clouds of spume the color
of gun-metal and swirled
to the sun in volleys of smoke-
cartwheeling bodies flailing
by sealed or shattered windows
to battering, smattering rest --
Horrid in theory, the poem in reality fails and is anything but harrowing; the "snow" of faxes is an expected metaphor, and the "cartwheeling bodies" that come to a Hopkins-sounding "battering, smattering rest" are objectified and dehumanized, reduced to rhyme.
Several poems are drawn toward vehicular disaster. "Accident Ahead" gawks over "relics of bus/ hoods crumpled like excelsior," while "The Wreck" sensationally describes and lingers over a
"cracked telephone
pole" that "dangles snapped and sizzling
wires" and back-lights a "parked Plymouth,
its hood and headlights bulldogged
by the impact."
The gruesome and tawdry "Documentation" amplifies ruination to a national, even transcontinental scale. Hazo oddly pairs anonymous "convicted/ wretches tied and torched,/ their hair in flames, their eyeballs/ gone to madness from the pain" with "Benito Mussolini shot/ and hung by the boots like carcass/ beef in Piazza Loreto."
First Published April 24, 2005 12:00 am
