MADreads

Bread and ascenscion

November 14th, 2007 Jim - South Madison

Poet Gabriel Fried describes riding on a ferris wheel in one’s small, rural hometown as offering “the feel of dough and the pleasures of ascenscion.” His prize winning collection, Making the New Lamb Take, delivers in a similar fashion.

The biblical, classical and pastoral imagery and stories girding many of the poems have been often told and used.  Oh no, another poem featuring the Eurydice/Orpheus story? This collection has three good ones, offering vantage points on the story that were new to me.

Stylistically conventional, the poetry is full of rhyme and alliteration; while he employs end-rhymes sparingly,  nearly every other line features an internal one.  Fried delights in assonance.  In many cases, he resorts to quiet and simple rhymes that are barely there, but when consciously noted, please and induce smiles.

Cloaked in this bread of tradition (and bread’s a good thing in my book), Fried’s poems take sudden and strange turns delivering the reader to new ground and perspective.  Or should that be new depths?  His poems have a vortex-like effect: each line propelling you down to the one below it till you find yourself at poem’s end, a bit breathless and asking “what have I just heard?” 

Fried’s poems speak to the experience of mourning and hope. The voice in many seems to be struggling to recall a marvelous vision or knowledge that, like a half-remembered dream, seems to only decay and grow uncertain with the effort of recall.  Conversely, others express a yearning or hope based on the hunch that our present conceptions of reality are as the ant’s to our own.

I would be hard-presseded to abstract in a line or two the thoughts and emotions evoked by many of the poems in this promising debut collection.  Instead, one is best left with the poems themselves as precise evidence of the emotion/thought they evince.  A collection that tantalizes, frustrates and fosters attention.

Entry Filed under: Literary Fiction, Poetry