Oubliette

Rating:
Summary: gnosticism just got a whole lot sexier
Review: I didn't know or care much about the gnostic scriptures until I heard Peter Richards give a reading in Boston this spring. His reading was amazing, the poems and delivery poised between ecstasy and complete devastation. What surprised me most was how sexy he made spiritual concerns seem--the way he blended the erotic and the contemplative lives. The poems in Oubliette give voice to the dirty saint in all of us and should be cherished for that reason.

Rating:
Summary: An Interesting Debut and Cautionary Tale
Review: Once you get past the incredibly silly and hyperbolic preface by Tomaz Salamun--in which we learn that Peter Richards is pretty much the Jesus Christ of poetry--there is a lot of good stuff going on in Richard's poems. They happen in a verbally and temporily dislocated place which is infused by linguistic inventiveness, a welcome sense of humor, and a sometimes quite moving spiritual sincerity. They suffer, however, from the sort of fashionable but unnecessary opacity that cripples so much of the work being done by some of today's younger--and older-- poets. Richards is an American who in choosing to write like an Eastern European surrealist (not surprising, since he also a translator) ends up muddling his own very strong voice with a too self-conscious and deliberate obscurity (which would be okay if it were more generative than distracting). I guess that a very strong poet can make anything work, and Richards may make his chosen style work yet, but this too often comes across as pretentious in trying so hard to be "deep."

Rating:
Summary: True and clear, more familiar than "religious magma" . . .
Review: The reviews on this book's page (and even some of the blurbs on its back cover) seem, unfortunately, to be of the sort that discourage people from exploring poetry. I was a student a few years back in Peter Richards' excellent poetry class at Tufts University, and his most remarkable talent as both teacher and writer was to rescue this art from pretentious language and cryptic ramblings. The value of his instruction is just as evident in his own work compiled here. Consider, for example, "The Moon is a Moon," a poem that appears to be a reaction to verse that obfuscates reality rather illuminating it: "The moon is not a hole / into an alternate sky / where the dark is quiet, / the thunder white.... / The moon is a rock with blue scrapes." Here, as elsewhere, Richards demonstrates that the most poetic insights inhere, as I can imagine him saying, in the quotidian, and are lost on those who think so little of their own experiences and sensations that they must supplement them with an artificial depth. I do not mean to suggest by this that the beauty of these poems is always obvious on the surface: Most need to be read many times for full effect. They also are best appreciated line-by-line, the better to absorb the clarity that is the hallmark of Richards' voice. Real highlights in this collection include "Circled Square Drawn to Scale," "This is the Color," "Boy for Sale," "The Sea Looking On," "Central Square," and others. I would especially recommend this book to readers of Charles Simic, Pattiann Rogers, and Wallace Stevens.