Daniel
Beauregard. 421 Atlanta, $5 + shipping, 28
pages, 7 x 8.5".
When I
teach college Lit courses, I spend most of the poetry unit re-teaching my
students how to read poetry. Some ground
rules: 1) don’t assume everything is a metaphor, 2) sometimes language and sound
are just as important or more important than meaning, 3) read poems with a
sense of humor, 4) a poem is often “about” more than one thing, 4) if you like
a poem, you should read more poems.
Daniel
Beauregard’s BEFORE YOU WERE BORN could be a handbook for this kind of
reading. The poems in the chapbook are
often prose poems, often alliterative, sometimes koans, sometimes jokes, each
lovely to read out loud. The final lines
of “Bathing in Gold,” are a study of language: “to fixate for a moment on the
fuzzy/ limbs of a persimmon then sit back down/ ass-first, giving myself
permission to orange.” The repetition of
sounds, the way “persimmon” mirrors “permission,” and the unexpected but
somehow appropriate use of “orange” are par for the course in Beauregard’s
poetry.
The
poems have a playfulness and a sense of humor that gives some of the more
serious ruminations a nice wink. “Flirt
Poem” takes us from a car that gets our speaker “from A to B, and C on
weekends,” to “people read[ing] their own shit like tea leaves,” to the
closing, “The doily of our love. Come to me, gluing crumbs/ together until
we’ve got the whole Danish.”
And
just like the unexpected use of “orange,” just like our movement from car to
love as Danish, what strikes me most about Beauregard’s work is his ability to
start with one image or thought and fan out into the surprising and the
seemingly unrelated. “Red Velvet Koan”
connects the practice of Ubsante to
lonely Kathy in the break room. In
“Maths,” he writes, “As a kid/ I made pictures of numbers committing suicide,
then you.” Sometimes the connection is
easy to see, sometimes it’s a jump that stops you, but one that somehow makes
sense.
Many
of the poems are also written in the style of other writers, Nick Sturm and
Bruce Covey, for example. And while the
poems still feel very much like Beauregard’s, they serve as their own
connections to and celebrations of poetry right now, one that can send readers
to seek out the inspiration of their favorite poems.
BEFORE
YOU WERE BORN is the second release from the new press 421 Atlanta, and it’s
promising of more great reads to come. (January, 2014)
Purchase
Before You Were Born HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Christy Crutchfield’s novel How to
Catch a Coyote is forthcoming from Publishing Genius in 2014. Her work
has appeared in Mississippi Review online, Salt Hill Journal, the
Collagist, Newfound, and others. Visit her at christycrutchfield.com
