| Books |
| Review: Entertaining “Before, During and After” |
| by William Ruben Helms |
| Despite minor qualms about repetition, “Before, During and After: Poems” is an excellent and entertaining read |
Book: Title: Before, During and After: Poems
Author: Hal Sirowitz
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Pub Date: December 2003
Page Count: 124
To be human, it seems utterly natural and perhaps comic that we all at some point obsess about dating and sex; after all, we cannot – despite what philosophers and poets may say – fight biological impulse and imperative. With our more animalistic nature often taking over our rational, polite selves, it would not be a gross assumption or generalization to say that many of us have countless times made fools of ourselves, made horrible decisions, or even worse! And speaking with the neurotic rhythms and intonation of the native New Yorker – in a poetic voice that I know as a fellow New Yorker – Sirowitz makes an attempt at being a rare poet, a poet who makes the personal events and circumstances of their lives universal and transcendent.
Where Sirowitz is successful and at his most hilarious is when he, through the voices of our lovable ***** up of a protagonist and the women he both successfully and unsuccessfully chases, displays how ridiculous we all could be when it comes to affairs of the heart. If anything love, much like death is a universal equalizer. Not only do we all fall in love but also, love manages to make us all a bit foolish – even the most cynical. But what makes “Before, During and After,” so particularly interesting is that while being funny, it’s doesn’t have a sense of meanness or an overly postmodern ironic streak that many these days are familiar with. Indeed both sides, both men and women, are portrayed as equally ridiculous creatures.
By providing some tender, compelling moments such as “The Bigger Problem,” “Putting Off My Goodbye,” Sirowitz manages to display an amazing sensitivity and maturity. These are poems that tackle troubled relationships, relationships so troubled that both sides either don’t know how to overcome them or they know how they have to overcome them but they fear the result –and they're done without appealing to cliché or insulting the reader’s intelligence. “The Meaning of Sex,” is a poem that accurately describes dating and sex as an absurd competition to impress the fickle and shallow.
Sadly where the book fails is that there’s a sense of repetition. Certain images, motifs and phrases. There are several poems that obsess with some excruciating detail about women’s underwear, vaginas, counting the number of times one has sex and so on. And the repetition – which will make the reader say “didn’t I see this one before” – does weaken the book a bit but it’s a minor complaint in comparison to a rather excellent and entertaining book.
Originally published on http://dawsonprogressive.com on 11/04 |
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