This
is the Ocean
Robert Krut. Bona Fide Books, $15 paperback (82p)
ISBN 978-1-936511-08-2
Something awful has happened. Or is going to happen. Or maybe it was just overheard. Maybe it wasn’t awful – maybe it was
beautiful. A dream? In any case, Robert Krut seems to be the only
one left alive to tell it. I wouldn’t
necessarily classify Krut’s second poetry collection, This is the Ocean, as post-apocalyptic, but it is definitely post-something. He’s not writing about our world, at least
not a world I recognize. “Everyone’s
losing their shit all around me/ it seems,” he says. Judging by the semi-grotesque reality that
his poems inhabit, I can understand why.
Krut’s verse is loose and fluid, sometimes to the
point of feeling shaggy, each line just long enough to capture the picture in
his mind and reproduce it effectively on the page. The mental image seems to be where most of
his poems begin. His effort lies in accurately transmitting that image to the
reader, so that we may see what he sees.
What he sees is at turns wonderful and
horrible. His physical world is
constantly transmogrifying mundane objects into human body parts, or vice
versa: fingers become comets, arms become roman candles launching toward the
moon. Krut is at his best when he finds
surprising yet perfectly precise combinations, such as the charming simile of
driftwood “looking like the folded hands/ of the oldest surf rat in all
California”.
Though the world he describes is totally his own,
there are occasions when his vision becomes a little too brooding. Rather than insightful and original,
describing skylines as broken teeth and tree branches as “night’s veins” sound
childishly macabre, like lines we would find in a goth teenager’s
notebook. I prefer Krut when his focus
shifts from light body-horror to more fanciful observations, like seeing a
man’s arms “as fat pythons that drop from his torso,/ heavy snakes that just
lie there, occasionally/ lifting their heads to stare us down.”
If this poetry exists in a state of post-something, then it leaves us with a
question: what remains? One of Krut’s
continuing themes is the ocean, the way it rises, rinses the world, drowns us,
and dissolves us. If the world were
scraped clean in a flood of biblical proportions, what would be left? Krut’s ruminations on legacy are apparent
through his work, even if they are never fully explained. Fingerprints are a repeated motif. They are
one way a person can put their imprint on the world that may survive when they
are gone - “His fingerprints mark/ the universe’s inside”. Here the book’s jacket design is worthy of
mention, as it cleverly links two of Krut’s main preoccupations: the ocean’s
blue-black waves illustrated in the same whorls and arches that make up a
fingerprint.
Like a fingerprint, the best image-based poetry
leaves a dent on the backs of the reader’s eyeballs. Krut accomplishes this with his varied yet
consistently intelligent verse. Still,
his work would benefit from some stricter parameters, forcing him to focus as
much on the words themselves as the pictures he is trying to create. As it is, the visual lingers after the poem
is complete, but the passage often fades.
Campus Before Sunrise, The Sun and the Octopus, and the fun
little experiment of 39 Poems Left in the
House when Henry Walked Out and Disappeared are some of the standout
pieces.
Another of Krut’s recurring nouns is ink; ink
collected in bottles, dissolving in the water, an ink-black cloud, or writing
on a page. “I have come from the bottom
of the ocean,” the book’s final poem ends, “and I am here to tell you about
it.” A writer’s legacy is their
work. Perhaps ink is to the poet what a fingerprint is to a human, some sort of
evidence - no matter how slight - that this place has been touched. (October 2013)
Purchase This
is the Ocean HERE.
Reviewer bio: Tom Taff lives and works in Saint
Paul, Minnesota.
