Candy Necklace

Bedient has a happy way of putting things, and often finds it within himself to turn some inconsequential trivial everyday things into the subjects of a sonorous, sermonlike poetry. Take the "Candy Necklace" in the title poem. An elderly professor visits the student bookstore and sees a necklace made of candy for sale. "Blue, yellow, white and pink beads snuggling together." It's whimsical and fun and something suitable for the very young, so already the poem has a bit of the late Yeats AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN type of wistfulness. "They make me want a hug," Bedient confesses. And he thinks back to his daughter's precious youth. "A mountain cannot but look down/ on the clefts its heavings made. My daughter's/ the thicket in which I bleed." Bedient has a sotoriously sexual way of putting matters, and there's no sex metaphor left unchurned in his remarkable, auspicious debut. He will go far in poetry, but based on the author photo on the back of the book, he has a kind of Jeff Chandler good looks which would have won him a certain manner of fame in the late 1950s, though the picture looks like his skin's now a little leathery maybe from the UCLA sun. Easygoing and friendly, now scary and electrifying, Bedient's poems carve themselves a new pathway through the leather saddle of American letters. He knows how to surprise the reader, and how to tickle him (or her) until nearly time for the family romance.

Like Robert Browning in "Porphyria's Lover," Cal Bedient gets inside the heads of the ill and insane. His poems "Very Oyster, Very Few," "Grief," "Any Son of a Bitch," "The Child is the Keeper of the Garden" are especially like Browning's in their ability to evoke a startled and often deeply emotional response from the reader. The poet's facility with language is astounding: fresh, demanding, luscious, and free as in these lines from "Back a Van Gogh Yellow": "Life, you say, is the greatest / nothing, exactly imagined-- / red-gold on the wall / the ellipsoid / smear of the sun."