Old Men, Girls and Monsters
Mar 08
Literature, Review, writing achilles chapbooks, dogzplot, peter schwartz, poetry, Review, writing No Comments
Old Men, Girls and Monsters
by Peter Schwartz
Achilles Chapbook Series
I watch the mail obsessively. I do this because sometimes it brings me exactly what I need at a given moment. The thin envelope from Peter Schwartz was one of those serendipitous instances. The contents of that package was a slim chapbook filled with poems that were right. Just right.
Peter Schwartz has collected here a few long poems that make exquisite shapes on the page. He uses lovely structures to contain a language of grief and loss that it as touching as it is extraordinary.
He gives us here his obsessions. Exits, loss, godheads, and gut tearing metaphor. He has drawn here images of the fragile and the broken. The homeless and the suicidal and the tortured wander these pages voiding their pain into the world.
In the poem “Caves” he forces us to examine the rooms, hotels, hostels and spaces where the sad live. In “The ABCs of Loss” he draws for us a perfect portrait of children twisted and deformed emotionally.
Possibly the best poem in the collection is “Please Don’t Name That Reservoir.” Schwartz describes for us a deep well (reservoir, really) of all the world’s pain and despair. He begins with the line:
“There is a reservoir of sacrifice so there and yet so invisible,
calling it God wouldn’t even help”
This is the perfect lead in to a poem with such emotive power. Here Schwartz is wielding language like a brush in the hands of a master painter. Each stroke of the brush adds another layer of beauty and pain.
Old Men, Girls and Monsters is a fine collection. It is a small thing of beauty to be cherished.
