ANGLES OF DISORDER
BlazeVOX (Books) (www.blazevox.org) ; 2009 – 96 pages
I think I’m writing this review in reverse, but the almost too brilliant Angles of Disorder by Zachary Bush is a deconstructive whirlwind around the wheel of life, which when it ends, kind of pulls the whole thread together with a poem entitled “The Hard Truths About Living and Dying,” particularly the last line:
“When you die there is no breath, and your life’s true purpose is finally realized. There is absolutely no meaning, and there is a great disappointment that can never be eradicated.”
Perhaps not so hopeful, but what did you expect from a book whose sections are marked off by a stick figure, ostensibly “the poet” who comes apart piece by piece throughout the manuscript and what’s left afterward, the head (or perhaps even “the intellect”) itself slips off the page until there is nothing left.
What precedes that final line is a Smorgasbord of modernism, put on display by Bush and then reflected through his own prism meditating on the impossible contradiction of poetic existence, that is, a dissonance (disorder) permeating all functioning dichotomies (angles.) They’re all here disguised in Bush’s peculiar yet resonant rhetoric…exquisite corpse (“From Within The Vortex”, invoked in “The Difference”) concrete poetry (When You Are Dead) absurdist archetypes (“The Goldfish”) dream journaling and yes, even some very clever and playful LangPo:
“Overweight Water Queen, sobbing top 50 Doo-Wop Hits. Sketching the differences in U.S. Stop Signs. An American Flag waxed in yellow wax hangs still-to-still life. The flag hangs 8 ½ feet above a village of matchstick castles, unable to melt because of the confused conversion. That, most likely, was just another Blackout contortion. See: no breeze, no sound & nothing near to sestina humidity. Yet something is sweating. Wax sings: drooping, dropping, releasing & splattering onto the sand. The sand, that resembles volcanic ash, covers the ground. Aquarius has gone tonight. ‘A’is as realized now. I see the all-consuming Frequency (trying like a bastard) to consume me…constantly dreaming in circles.”
-from “From the center of The Circle”
The themes of “Hunger,” “Time” and “Energy” get their own sections, as these characteristics, personified, archetyped or otherwise, drive Bush’ deconstructionist spiral. In the end, there is only the void or the sense of the abysmal, personified and manifest in Angles’ final section, by poems entitled “While You Sleep In The City,” Before the Spinning Color Wheel Becomes our Primary Source of Energy,” and “The Last Three Days of Your Final Starvation.” “The Disappearing Act” in this section is among the darkest and most chilling in the whole collection:
“This boy’s mother once threw a pot of boiling water at his head when she caught him down in the basement, loving on the hunting dogs. This boy said nothing when the bigger boys shoved a branch inside of him. This boy was found in the woods by his father with the end of a branch planted deep inside of his ass.
This boy, when no one was watching, would urinate and defecate on the things that were for sale: glass ashtrays, silverware, empty bookshelves, second-hand sofas, and manual typewriters. This boy’s father laughed at him, when he found him in the woods, and called him a Patsy.
This boy made sure his mother and father were deep asleep before he took off all of his clothes, walked out the back screen-door, and followed the moonlight to the middle of the lake…”
Bush is at his strongest when he is grinding out his iconic prose analogies. Much of his experimental form here, while well executed, is at times superfluous to the otherwise powerful narrative that actually permeates the entire book with an impending sense of dread. It is in the prose passages where Bush truly synthesizes a model that is part Buddhist, part Scientific Method, into a genuinely fresh Surrealism. There is the implication that no matter how “efficient” a model for existence is developed by a poet or philosopher or any human for that matter, it’s necessary imperfections lead back to a single, inevitable end.
The ghosts of Ezra Pound and John Keats also haunt this book (“The Vortex & Memory”) as Bush demonstrates in nearly all the pieces here his comfort with Negative Capability and the self-awareness of the poet. No question Angles of Disorder is a BIG debut in the tradition of poets who are them-selves aware of pushing the form forward. What’s unusual is finding this combination of talent and awareness in an author who is only twenty-five: not even Gen X but Gen Y. Many young authors over reach on debut collections, or are too anxious to “flex” their poetic muscles. Bush has given us plenty of flexing here, but delivers on all the goods.
