Poetry is a school of writing which has long held fascination to me. My adolescence was inked with endless notebooks stuffed full of the stuff. College found me interning at a small poetry press and schooled by award winning poet laureates whose verses seemed to be just a fingertip beyond my reach all the time. I think perhaps my education, the distance between my own verses and my here-and-now has caused me to be a little too harsh when it comes to judging someone’s poetry. The space between myself and the leaves of Redic’s collection, too, I think must give me pause. The truth is, I actually liked a few these.
While the poem “Secret Wish” is punctuated by a borderline hokey picture of a Native American in apparently ceremonial garb, the verse is solid and hopeful. Lines like “ Motionless, breathless / he seeks / to again become one of the trees”(9-11) betrays both the speaker’s solitude and desperation as it does his calling sense of connection and desire to be whole with the universe. There is a softness here. Long ago, immigrants and war heroes could be diagnosed with “nostalgia”, an illness characterized by pervasive ennui brought on as result of pleasant memories. Some of Redic’s poems fit this definition of nostalgia more coherently than its modern connotation.
At the same time, many of Redic’s poems contain an air of the ridiculous which is sometimes hard to shake in favor of the better verses. For instance, the rhyming poem, “Love at McDonald’s” sounds more like a sing-song playground ditty than a poem worthy of respect with verses like “Sometimes it’s messy and / gets on your shirt, / And sometimes you have it / right out in the dirt”(10-13). Meanwhile, poems like “Hunger”, which describes the angst of a youth who misses being beaten by his alcoholic father because at least then, he was acknowledged, are a little too melodramatic to be taken seriously, containing teen-ish lines like “I / smell his alcoholic habit, / And know . . . . / my inheritance is ordained” (9-12).
It can be said that I’ll never love a poet so much as I love my Byron, Shakespeare, or even Plath and Ginsberg, but I can say that Redic is not half bad. I think if he spends a little more time in the company of good writing (whether read or taught, discussed or impressed), he’ll really hammer out at least one powerful verse before we see the last of him. In the meantime, we’ll settle for poems that are on the better side of middle.