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As you can tell from its title, John Repp’s new collection is a feast for readers who feel the hyper-loadedness of life. There may be more variety of nouns in this book than in any other book of poems; one typical sentence includes sublimity, leaf piles, silhouettes, highway, Santini’s Lunch, air strip, crop-dusters, biplanes, flautist, Symphony Hall, tarps. Repp’s elegiac energy builds a world of memories he cherishes with such charm that the reader cherishes them too." I could enthuse all day over John Repp’s deft ability to make music out of our casual American English (“the smoke of zapped bees/curls above the workers whacking buckets of orange balls/into the weedy heat”). But then I couldn’t get around to his epigrammatic power (“Spirochetes/are sometimes the price/of ecstasy”) and his canny choosing of just-the-right-words for his details (“the trout’s mildewed tail,” “the silken sluice of milk in the morning”) and his empathy for blue-collar (or brokenly lower-down) seamy, steamy love and strife. These poems want to mix it up at the Whippy Dip, the Korean market up Broadway, Vince’s Auto, the Woodstown Diner where Tina heaps up the fries, and the Maplewood on Dyke Night. Go ahead, step in, the poems and their people are waiting for you: “The door between the worlds has always stood open.” |