John Latta, Breeze

Literary Review, Spring, 2004 by Rene Steinke

John Latta, Breeze. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003.

"There's a word for what I'm experiencing today, / Though that word only draws an arc in haze, / An incomplete circle, and requires more words ..." In his poems, John Latta walks this tightrope between meaning and non-meaning, as he balances high up in the air, leaping, somersaulting, each gesture full of grace and wit. Some poets who take on the limits of language as their driving subject tend to be either humorless or heartless. John Latta is neither. Breeze, John Latta's second collection, which won the 2003 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, is a masterful performance.

The poems are full of jokes: "(A dictionary is combing / Big words out of its hair)," "What matters is not matter," "The there, where, just / Horsing around becomes the horse." Nonetheless, these are by no means "light" poems, but dense ones, their philosophical complexities made nimble by an engaging, conversational voice.

The poems are also moving in their lament at language's lacks. In "The Limits of Language," this theme is played through the contemplation of rain and its refusal to be adequately rendered in words, metaphor allied with "any smeary coincidence the world can muster" and the sound of rain stubbornly described, though no description ever quite settles. "At Nag's Head" explores the impossibility of fully knowing the world, and the sadness of not being able to know it: "Deep in the primordial / Night we exchange light shivery dream-doings--// Of leaving, of being left. You curl like a cloud / Around me and we sleep and wake / To a morning of hundreds of clouds."

These are meta-poetic, reflective poems, with syntax twisted into miraculous shapes like balloons knotted into animals. And there are intriguing nods to Cicero, Tristan Tzara, and Robert Duncan. "Eligio di Frank O'Hara" channels the legendary New York City poet from the dead, through the lure of an Italian landscape. "You got through it all through pure charm, / Like a little grinning quark, knowing bravado / To be as specious as any other absolute, dashing / Naked into the night-stormy ocean, the only man awake / On earth and nobody left to play with." The poem is an exhilarating meditation on artistic influence and its lasting effects. "Garden Variety Stories," a prose poem, playfully nudges conventions of narrative, calling its assault on the reader "a voice swooping down out of the logical north to ransack your monastic neural forest."

Though they take ideas as their subject matter, the poems are ingeniously concrete, the images fresh and resonant. "The only noise that / Of tires pulling / A long stuck bandage off the black wound of the road." "Or knotting the swim trunks / He has just slipped into, the blue chlorine--/ Spiked pool racing out its swim // Lanes right there in front of him." Latta uses a loose, longish line, which suits his speaker's reveries, but never veers out of control.

Latta, like William Gass, is a writers' writer, able to make us see whole worlds, whole novel plots, in the design of a single sentence. These intense reminders of the never-ending problems of naming, of putting into words, will send writers rushing to their desks, eager to give it another try.