Downfall of the Straight Line
Charles O. Hartman’s eighth book of poems, Downfall of the Straight Line, vibrates with dazzling rhythms, masterful syntax, linguistic wit, and descriptions that are precise and surprising at the same time. From a dead backyard tree to a Greek city, from a lovers’ bed to a lost lover, the poems display both intellectual depth and emotional complexity. We hear the voices of pianos, a donkey, and the supernova birthing the Crab Nebula; we watch as the poet scrutinizes the moon, and listen as he contemplates death, “a sudden change in plans for the afternoon.” Hartman wastes no words: every stanza shows a nimble mind at work. Downfall of the Straight Line is a book to read with attention and delight. And then to read again.
Hartman’s singular grasp of musical possibilities is what makes his new collection of poems, Downfall of the Straight Line, such a thrilling read. For his ‘rehearsals/ of the opulent impromptu,’ as he writes in his dramatic monologue ‘The Pianos,’ inevitably lead to revelations about the ways in which our most essential relationships contain their own time and key signatures, rhythms, and melodies. Hartman has a gift for charting ‘the niceties of geometry,’ wherever they may be found — in the sky, on the water, in the beloved’s gestures. He writes, ‘here are keys but to what kingdom.’ The answers ring out from every page of this astonishing book.
Christopher Merrill
A Glorious Sky
The clouds look proud
because we have to gape so far up.
Really they’re confused and disconcerted:
herded, riven, with not much time
as clouds. How fine
that they up there
take after us: waiting, demented by brevity,
driven askew, evaporating.
(But what levity! What a view!)
We Know
The time will come, we know, when one of us,
catching a summer chill,
takes on the fulltime, lifelong chore of being ill;
or something sidesteps all that fuss,
some blow we won’t have leisure to discuss—
one absent-minded footfall on a hill,
or too close to a cougar’s kill.
Soon or late, one will prove the obvious.
The other, paperwork and speeches done, will come
home to the thought of home, wanting a drink,
a kiss, not to be there another year or twenty.
In that too spacious minimum,
at least for a time there will be time to think
back over plenty.