[New-Poetry] Perloff on Kleinzahler

[jforjames at aol.com]

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article4302416.ece

July 9, 2008
August Kleinzahler's ugly gifts

Kleinzahler’s New York makes the London of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land seems almost pastoral
Marjorie Perloff 

In an arresting poem called “Meat”, August Kleinzahler wonders: 

How much meat moves 
Into the city each night 
The decks of its bridges tremble 
In the liquefaction of sodium light 
And the moon a chemical orange 


The monstrous “Semitrailers strain[ing] their axles” as they “take the long curve / Over warehouses and lofts” to pour their guts into Manhattan, clog “the city’s shimmering membrane” with “tons of dead lamb / Bone and flesh and offal”. Garbage in, garbage out: the city where this cycle takes place is “A giant breathing cell / Exhaling its waste / From the stacks by the river / And feeding through the night”. 


Compared to the sheer, unrelieved ugliness of Kleinzahler’s New York, the London of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land seems almost pastoral. 

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