American Fractal

Timothy Green's first collection is a great read, and difinitely worth buying. I sat with this book of poems and came upon "Hiking Alone;" echos of Gary Snyder, and yet smoother, contemporary, but just as wise and fun. Then, "What Passes For Optimism at MacArthur Park," a perfect sonnet that also proves Green has, as Bukowski once said, "the stink of L.A. in [his] bones." After these two examples, I knew this book was better than any other collection I'd purchased in the last year. And I've bought a lot of poetry. The most amazing piece is the last poem, "In the Parking Lot of Our Dreams." I won't quote it here, just get it. This collection, at least for me, works best if read from the inside out. Eventually, almost every poem grows on you, which is very rare for a book of poems these days. Like fractals, it is a pattern that unfolds seemingly in an unpredictable way, but then manages to form coastlines, a world, and eventually an entire universe.

I come from a school of thought that if a book has three or four really good poems that stick to your ribs, then, it's a success. American Fractal has that in spades. I just loved "Fifty-Hour Online Binge" & "What Passes for Optimism", which is a musical, pastoral gem. It's a fallback, old school kind of poem, clean, with euphonious lines that echo the work of Robert Lowell and Donald Justice. The poems, while graceful, seem born out of necessity, a kind of mild human obsession. It was Auden, I think, who contended, that he was writing his poems alone in his room for another anonymous lonely in his room. I get that sense that Green's poems are that personal, aware of their audience of one, intimate without being exclusive. "Microcassette" is a fabulous poem, maybe my favorite in the book, as in "Diorama". These poems feel like they had no possibility of being written by anyone else, which is the mark of a truly individual voice. The work is poetic without being self-conscious, a rare ability that I envy. This is a wonderful first book--but readers should not be deceived into thinking that Green's sense of humor and personality make these poems, in any way, slight. I encourage anyone interested in the present state of American poetry to read this book. It's worthwhile and a beautiful contribution to the American poetry scene

When I finished reading American Fractal, I went back and read it again, partly to coax some of the lines out of the first-reading haze that in my experience surrounds all poems of substance and partly because I wanted to relish the sounds and images again. A few of the fifty poems still remain, for my traditionalist mind, obscure, but the thing is that I can at least sense coherence in even the hardest, such as "The Body," and, most of all, I can enjoy the precise images and intriguing sounds: "starspecks in the foxglove," "a blind bat on a billboard unfurling leather wings / unfurling night," "costume jewelry that would stain a tiny finger green." That poem has the immediate attractiveness that calls me back to keep arranging and rearranging the shards, trying to put the vase together. Most of these poems are as accessible as most of the ones that run in Rattle, of which Green is editor--and accessibility is the one stipulation he makes for submissions. The word "fractal," meaning an irregular shape whose small parts look like its larger parts, is new to me, but fortunately the poems don't carry out the threat of higher geometry. They content themselves with being passionate, reflective, imaginative, frightened, and funny, like all fine poems. One of my favorites is "Cooking Dinner," in which the speaker's sensibility and vulnerability are so heightened that his whole body seems to be receiving grim signals from the world the way silver fillings in teeth can pick up radio broadcasts. Another is "Hiking Alone," with a powerful image of a creek flowing out of dark caves into light and back into darkness. A fish passes through and sees itself, presumably for the first time, before plunging "back into his comfortable / dark, this eyelet the only opening for miles." And I love "In the Parking Lot of Our Dreams," which is as brown as Hardy's "Neutral Tones" is gray, though to a far more cheerful effect. The only change of color comes when a woman on a ladder, painting a building brown, "reaches up / to draw a second coat / over the highest rung / and a bluebird tattoo / rises from her waistline / like the morning sun." I hope I was right to chuckle at the poet's decision at the end to spend his few remaining coins on a cup of (brown) coffee and a (brown) Milky Way. Most of the Fractal poems are in free verse, but barely so, often divided into shapely stanzas and sometimes containing a number of unobtrusively iambic lines. A few poems are formal, including three sonnets; a few are made up of brief, unpunctuated, uncapitalized phrases that float amid wide blank spaces like a sky full of small clouds. This collection, Green's first, is both brilliant and moving, and, since he's still in his twenties, we can surely hope to see more and more of his superb work.