Review by Mack Hassler
References
- Paul Fussell, Meter and Poetic Form (1965)
- Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)
Kelly Peach prides himself on being an “author” in a rather charming way in Please, Do Not Tap on the Glass about the form of his poems. I have seen his work published in the UP Reader. He is a Yooper and a poet. His parents he tells us bought him all the books he could read and gave him when he graduated from high school the large e.e. cummings Complete Poems 1913-1962. “They believed in me,” he writes. (p.43). Later his wife and daughters gave him the same encouragement. Still I think it would be well if he means to make an author’s contribution in this nestling stage of our development as a culture with its distinct literature his ideas on prosody needs more substance. What I suggest is that he needs more knowledge of the whole field and the interconnections between form (prosody is the fancy word for poetic form) and the history of ideas. Paul Fussell happens to be a great resource who is getting some attention as I prepare this review (The New York Times Book Review for this Sunday 23 March 2025 prints a long article “This Book on World War I Changed How I Think About Nonfiction” remembering his 1975 book above). Fussell knows prosody, in the earlier book, and in the later one he writes about the forms as they are used in one of the major events of modern times—The Great War. Fussell had enlisted in the middle of his college work for service as a decorated officer in World War II. He knew prosody from school. He knew events from experience.
What Fussell plays with in his two substantive books listed above is both form and the jolting away from Enlightenment and Victorian regularity by the experience and the horrors of modern war. For the nerdy Peach, who builds his short book as a set of rather grimly titled sections: “fears of death,” “bad dreams,” “Thoughts of Suicide,” “Living in the Shadows” it seems to me that the jolt away from older forms is not so much warfare as it is the mental depression of modernity. Peach does have one sonnet that is embedded in the last of his sections, but it is not nearly as correct in its meter and smoothly formed in its rhymes as the Dante Gabriel Rossetti sonnet on Lilith. Rossetti had also painted as part of the pre-raphaelite school of late Victorian painters so that he did a painting of the angelic Llith that is just as smooth and cleverly divided conceptually between the octave and sestet of his sonnet. None of this elegant prosody nor amooth texture of the graphics survived the jolting bombardment of the Great War nor the free verse openness and horror of much of Peach’s middle sections on drugs and depression.
He knows how to open up both the lining and the images in a couple very powerful and longish free verse poems that suggest a very “modern” and “hellish” sensibility that may owe much to his readings of e.e. cummings and that seem particularly alien to the good-humored UP that many of us still believe in as the world of our literature. Much that I have reviewed for U.P. Book Review still seems to have a Victorian sensibility. I like Peach’s grim poems. I only wish he had developed more the literary traditions that ground them and the history of ideas. Maybe he does in the verse itself. Two fairly long poems, far from sonnets, in his section on “suicide” seem to be the best in the book. They are next to each other beginning on p. 26: “Honey Bee and Russian Roulette” followed by “A Hero’s Place.” The second is 67 lines long of variable length and intensity and deals with an army vet on Heroin who becomes so high that he steps into traffic on I75. He is dragged “at least three miles down the expressway… The worst pedestrian accident the/Coroner had ever seen.” The poem just before is also one that deals with drugs. A woman this time “deftly loads three rounds of fentanyl” into a silver revolver while “outside, the honey bee/ still flies on wounded wing….” That last phrase to me sounds very lyric, almost like Wallace Stevens.
All this brutal grimness makes me just want to shake Peach to give me more history of ideas and more discussion of verse techniques. I do not intend to discourage readers from paying attention to Please, Do Not Tap on the Glass. It is important. We are not living in a time that is as regular and as smooth as it might be. Much has been jolted out of order. We need a verse that corresponds with those jolts. I would like Peach to read Fussell and study his ideas and then continue with his own authorship.
Please, Do Not Tap on the Glass, by M. Kelly Peach (Alien Buddha Press, Middleton, DE,2025), 45 pages, n.p. pbk.
