One Way No Exit

One Way No Exit
G. C. Waldrep
Tarpaulin Sky Press

Whenever I start trying to write about this chapbook I just end up quoting it. I think that's a good sign. When I got done reading it the first time, I wanted to start over again.

These poems are concerned with responsibility--if that's the right word--to place & community. They are animated by a palpable ethical (or maybe even religious) impulse. They draw from a wide variety of sources, most noticeably an exhibition by German photographer Peter Rathmann called One Way: Fotografien (according to the acknowledgments, the titles of the 41 poems in the chapbook reproduce the titles of the 41 photographs in the exhibition). These might be ekphrastic poems, but they aren't what I normally think of when I think of ekphrastic poems.

These poems are about the mundane and the everyday. They do not, however, allow the mundane to crystallize into any image that might be considered transcendental or sacramental. They employ the structure of logical discourse, but only to send it in a-logical directions. Part of what makes these poems interesting is what they refuse to do:

Rathmann captures this scenario in a style which could be classified as
"aesthetic documentation." Rathmann believes the details are exciting.
According to received wisdom God is in the details.
God is therefore exciting. Rathmann's photographs constitute a documentary of God.
These are definitely not edifices created by masters of a metier.
These are definitely not edifices. Technical perfection lends these scenes
an almost charming quality. Rathmann believes
it is exciting to capture, it is exciting to qualify, it is exciting to lend.
Rathmann may or may not be a master of his metier.
Technical perfection lends charming scenes to God.

These poems are relentless in their refusal to accept an easy way out. They are also more than that refusal. They are a way of being (cliched as that phrase has become) relentlessly in the world (thus the book's title, I think). They are concerned with transportation (buicks are a recurring image), but they are less concerned with where they (or maybe we) are going than with how they (or we) are getting there:

This poem might be mistaken for a slown tool that releases--dormitory
allen wrench--this poem represents an earnest attempt to secure full funding for Amtrak
but is not hopeful. No poem is hopeful, it is not in the nature of poems to hope
just as it is not in the nature of photographs to correspond,
any correspondence in a photograph is provisional
and therefore suspect, one cannot live or make love in a photograph
(the idea of making love in a photograph is both mistaken and essentially French).
For hope as for correspondence one must turn to prose.
For long-distance stamina one looks past the photograph to the poem.

These poems are concerned with nationality ("The Welsh, ever generous, have extra vowels. they are a sweet, dark people / They would give us some if we asked"). They have spectacular one-liners, like "God is an American torso." They are, in short, pretty damn amazing. You should read them.

P.S. I can't get the line breaks to display properly. Imagine they are better.