Book Review: ALL THAT YELLOW by Chuck Kinder
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All That Yellow Poems by Chuck Kinder |
| Low Ghost Press, 2014 $8.00 |
Kinder’s debut poetry collection All That Yellow studies the “last spoke of yellowish, old-timey photograph light alone.” These poems remind me of the saying the more we remember something, the more we forget. Kinder preserves memories, crafts poems that travel wide spaces of time in a matter of lines. The grandness of this collection suggests a real necessity for each poem, as if the potential for forgetting, or miss-remembering, is right on the following page.
The beginning poem, “The Secret Life of Memory,” holds three sections: “Poem Full of Past,” “Poem with Wings,” and “Long Distance Poem.” The first section begins “The poem full of past has grown extreme like a baggie with too many memories …” and continues later with “The memories may appear to grow smaller through the / Membranes. Don’t believe it. It may be that you aren’t / Looking closely enough. Concentrate / Like the hedges, can you honestly say you see some buds?” As Kinder calls for our attention, his craft demonstrates the tangential nature of both poetry and memory. Each line begins with a traditional capital letter and there are few end stops or punctuation. The lines often fall away as they stretch the page, break off, and jump to a new image entirely on the following line. While this causes a start and halt effect, it speaks towards the disjointed flashes we experience from reflection. For example, “Poem with Wings” keeps short, brisk lines, reads,
Into a winter field
If you could just
Get yourself together
The white exhaust idles over a fresh snow
So far from the old love poems of the past
You can move anywhere alone now
Just now you follow the little cloud
Toward a single leafless tree…
As much as these concise lines reflect bits of memory, it also feels as though the speaker is short of breath. Again, this calls on the necessity of the poem, for the speaker runs out of breath trying to convey all that is relevant. In All That Yellow the voice sounds from a place of wisdom, as if the speaker has gathered and taken notes through the years in order to communicate his findings. Yet, often the second person address is less directed towards the audience, but back at the speaker. This provides the sense that an older, more critical version of the speaker is looking back on himself, on these moments, to shed some insight. The physical bodies of Kinder’s poems attest to this—“The Unbearable Mass and Beauty of Absence” is an expansive eight page poem. “The Secret Meaning of Old Movies as Seen on Late Night Television in Those Star Caves We Call Cheap, Lonely Motel Rooms” has a part a, b, and c, with part c also containing number sections. The entire poem spans fifteen pages. It’s safe to say Kinder has a range, and both the out-of-breath lines and the fifteen page poems show just how much Kinder has to say.