A Review of : False Prophet
Poems by Stan Rice
Jeremy Voigt
Both irreverent and biblical, Stan Rice’s final book is a series
of phantasmagoric Psalms. The Psalms pick up at number 151, where
the bible ended, and roll through a series of contemporary and ancient
images
composed in direct lines that alternately feel like rapid machine
gun fire and deep meditation.
“Psalm 175” starts out in the tradition of an aubade with
lovers eying each other. Though there seems to be an uneasy intimacy
with the line, “Inches away was her open and startled eye.” This
is standard Rice. He presents a simple situation, but drops the word “startled” into
a seemingly calm situation. Next he slips in and out of dream presenting
us with images of “melting faces” or a bride in a fig tree
as armies pass under her. These juxtaposed moments of beauty and imminent
violence become social commentary as messages are whispered into bullhorns,
and a “lack of knowledge keeps the people asleep.”
Occasionally Rice drops a line that seems more idiosyncratic than
aesthetically demanded by the poem. “There is babble like in a birdhouse.” is
a hard line to make sense of in the context of the poem. The moment
it arrives the persona is falling back to sleep from the serene setting
of two lovers. Perhaps it is from the dream world, or perhaps from
somewhere
in between, either way it reflects nothing mentioned before or after
it. Even so, the rhythm and alliteration of the line causes a nice
pause in the poem for a slight turn at the end as the poem winds and
returns
to the opening image.
Rice pushes us right up to a cliché image, but pulls back reflexively
to reshape the image. For example again in “Psalm 175,” the
image of carnal snakes arrives near the end, but then Rice pulls back
and says, “The image expresses the eternal For Instance.” This
may seem obvious but combined with a mix of sharp and strange images
this line pulls the poem (and perhaps the other poems) into a self-reflexive
meditative state. As if the Psalms are less sacred songs for god and
more sacred songs for precise attention paid to our sloppy language.
While this book is full of certain successes the major failing of
the book is the lack of editing. The editor’s note at the beginning
of the book reads,
These pages preserve idiosyncrasies of spelling and punctuation that
were characteristic of the poet, who in any case did not have the chance
to correct the galley proofs of this book.
While I respect the attempt to avoid mistakes similar to those imposed
on Emily Dickinson’s poems by editors, in this book the lack
of editing gets in the way. There are spellings that are obviously
errors
or do not imply any function in their error, and grammar at times
is awkward pulling the reader out of the poem. Just because the author
did
not have the opportunity to proof the book does not relinquish the
editorial responsibility to present the work in a readable manner.
This mistake
is severe enough that I will think twice about re-reading any part
of the book.