Krypton Nights

"We are all like Scheherazade's husband," wrote E.M. Forster, striking upon some fundamental wish in the human psyche to be abducted by the myth. Taking up where the DC comics leave off, Krypton Nights, Dietrich's brilliant suite of persona poems in the voices of Superman, Clark Kent, Lex Luthor, and Lois Lane plumb the depths of our human desire to make myth and to posit the existence of a God-made-man (be it Superman or the Messiah) who could save us. Whether writing a persona poem in the voice of a comicbook character or the lyric record of Branch Dividians in Waco, Texas as he does in another collection, Bryan Dietrich makes meaning out of our fascination with the psychological cariactures that loom large, in cartoon fashion, in our imagination. Against the backdrop of the heroic writ large, Dietrich counterpoints the all too common stuff of our human frailty and failure to successfully negotiate the personal and fashion a reasonable compromise with reality. Dietrich reminds us that great poems are ultimately great arguments with ourselves. Dietrich's voice, thinly clad in the bravado of Superman, reminds us that little stands between us and the disasters we witness on the news. Belief, fantasy, the will to be abducted by the fantastic: our distractions. The result is a compellingly compassionate voice that invites us to consider our guises, our masks, in the face of the possibility that no one is coming to save us and to ponder this pattern of days, our modernity, without myth.

How serious a subject matter is Superman? Serious enough for poetry to be based on him. Added to the media-crossing character's resume is now the noblest of the arts: verse - some blank and some not-so-blank. Mind you, this collection is no comic book - not that comic books don't offer fine entertainment and fine subtext in their own right - 'Kryton Nights' was the winner of the 2001 Paris Review Prize for Poetry; an organization not resigned to handing out awards to just anyone. Unfortunately, there are not so many deserving recipients in the poetry field these days; and those that do deserve are often buried amongst the countless worthless others. Only by sheer luck and my love for Superman did I stumble across this one. But alas, I have given away my first bias.Superman is the subject of this book, which is broken up into four parts: an autobiographical set of sonnets by Clark Kent, an series of tapes recorded by Jor-El for his son Kal-El, the poetic diary of Lois Lane, and a seething rant of Lex Luthor as penciled from Arkham Asylum. For any lover of Superman, this slim volume is irresistibly fun, just for the intelligent treatment given so many fabulously fantastical characters. For any lover of poetry (or just good writing) it offers its own set of treats. From hilarious 'what if' scenarios as told by Lois in "His Maculate Erection" to the sobering final lines of "The Fourth Man in the Fire": "Being the neighborhood / god, all guts and gusto, well, it's numbing. / / But here, just another byline for a vast news magnate, / I can stumble, fumble, fail. I can always quit the 'Planet'"As a sort of modern mythic god figure, Superman, in this text serves as a gateway to our older gods and religions; their cacophonies and inconsistencies go head to head in many of these poems. Dietrich weaves many subjects in and out of this comic world, as to blend them almost completely. The confusion of a spouse, the love of a father, the hatred and misdirected rage of a competitor, and the so-human exhaustion of a hero intermingled with countless references and sprinkled with often hilarious, often terrifying puns... it all makes for a fabulous read. Frequently blasphemous and always thought provoking, 'Krypton Nights' is the kind of book Superman deserved to have written about him, it definitively elevates his fictional status to one of a much greater (and as of yet unexplored) importance.