Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments (Iowa Poetry Prize)

book: Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments (Iowa Poetry Prize) | Joshua Marie Wilkinson

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Lug Your Careless ...

	Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments (Iowa Poetry Prize) Joshua Marie Wilkinson University Of Iowa Press, 2006 - 104 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Drawing from the paintings of Susan Rothenberg, Gwyneth Scally, and Eric Fischl as well as from the photography of Allison Maletz, Joshua Marie Wilkinson's Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk is a book-length poem written in small fragments. Comprised of seven sections, the poem is formed as much by the poet's travels through Turkey, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe as it is by the movies of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and Bill Morrison. The painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are here alongside whispers of Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk is a book of cinematic images and fragments, of small stories overheard and quickly abandoned, of hidden letters and phone booths, and of ghosts who return with questions.

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From Dusk to Dawn

I think "Lug" must stand for "lugubrious," but Joshua Wilkinson's new book is at any rate some sort of soul-changing experience, particularly for those with a fondness for the works of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. The scary monsters they disclose, the secrets from which their slightly later US contemporaries Susan Rothenberg and Eric Fischl drew 1980s neo-figuration, fascinate this young, upcoming poet, even though, as the old saying goes, "You can't go home again." Again and again, Mr. Wilkinson shows us the 2006 version of serial poems that zone in on one subject, or topic, and then flit off at the first sign of closure, too anguished to find even the momentary rest of a rhyme.

As FE Smith once wrote, "The world continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and sharp swords." Wilkinson's blade is sharp and his heart is not only stout but wide in compass. His fragmented poem drips with feeling, gathering up glimpses of the absurd and the understated in many countries round the globe. Not for nothing has he travelled to many places, and how refreshing it is to come upon a poet so concerned with European matters, not only those of an aesthetic nature, but of a geopolitical bent as well. In "The Bowling Alley's Most Beautiful Thief" we revisit not only his eroticized penchant for thievery (his totem animal should be the magpie) but we see troubling instances of the sort of institutionalized torture Amnesty International reports on but, of course, poets knew about it all along: "Triangulated position of girl thieves/ in the crossbeams, in the horizontal rafters./ Pulleys & ropes across, clicked into their bellies."

There are real bodies everywhere in the book, as the title points out. "Until you unstick the kite from the oak's branches./ /Until your name finds you in another body." And yet at the same time there's a drive away from the body and into a lyric mist, a confusion between realms ("Christmas or Boxing Day," wonders the bicoastal narrator, as though unable to distinguish the date.) "A duck perched on my oar, proof of my/ absence."

At the end of the book there's a list of previous winners of the Iowa Poetry Prize. That list is more chilling than a visit to the Winchester Mystery House. Read it and shiver for the vanity of earthly delights. These poets, who must have thought that their names and works would now live forever, form a gallery of has beens and never made its, with a few notable exceptions who are indeed among my closest friends

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