Moments of Delicate Balance
by David Lee and William Kloefkorn
9780916727789 || Cost: $16.95
Paperback , 176 pages
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Critical Praise for Moments of Delicate Balance
- No question, this book is rich: two fine collections published together. Lee's poems will make you laugh till your tears make it impossible to see the page. And then — you can't help it — Kloefkorn's poems will rise into memory with what has to be called a lyrical immediacy of voice. Together, both show us what joy vitality and fine storytelling can bring us. And I don't think anyone — not even William Carlos Williams — has had a better sense of line than theirs.
— James Hoggard, author Triangles of Light and Wearing the River; former Poet Laureate of Texas and past president, Texas Institute of Letters
- Bill Kloefkorn's poems are like meditations: the exact observations of the briefest moments told in the common words of the old prayers, made uncommon by the exactness of his observation, by his paying such close attention, by the accumulation of the years of craft behind them. And the poems of David Lee: nobody has a better ear for the telling colloquial speech than David Lee does, not even Cormac McCarthy or Flannery O'Connor. It's just about impossible to get it right, words and tone and all, the way David Lee does.
— Kent Haruf, author of Plainsong and Eventide, winner of the Dos Pasos Prize
- Kloefkorn and Lee are truly simpatico writers, both headstrong and heart-smart. Each understands that our lives are made up of countless "moments of delicate balance," where "delicate" is more a measure of exactitude than of any merely worrisome fragility. It's about finding the balance between the world we thought we knew and the world as we've come to know it all over again. Between what we'd like to believe and what we have to believe. Between the joyful noise we insist on making and the hard-won silence we're always grateful for. Kloefkorn moves effortlessly through his own space-time continuum — a lyric universe where past, present, and future can't help but coexist. Where the light of memory can be both particle and wave. Lee stretches out in some rollicking narratives, aided and abetted by diamond-tight lyricism, found poems, and wonderfully off-kilter reveries. But both poets demonstrate their shared, bedrock faith in language as a precision instrument that just might help them get to the heart of the matter. This is a book chock full of tenderness without sentimentality, laughter without derision, wisdom without sanctimony. And don't even get me started on the sheer music you'll be hearing; these guys are pitch-perfect contemporary American virtuosos.
— David Clewell, author of Taken Somehow by Surprise (Four Lakes Prize in Poetry) and Poet Laureate of Missouri
Reviews
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PaddlefishNovember 2011
Reviewed by
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PaddlefishNovember 2011
Reviewed by Eleanor Wilner
There is the sweet, pungent speech of the real in these poems, themselves moments of delicate balance, a shared volume by two old friends, well known and greatly loved by readers of poetry. And especially those from the West whose lingo, life and landscape have been shaped so memorably into poems by this pair: William Kloefkorn, State Poet of Nebraska, and David Lee, Utah's first Poet Laureate. In a way these heavy-duty honorific titles seem out of balance with the way both poets skewer pretension, roast it, and serve it up with a delightful play of wit and a lifetime of accumulated wisdom. How so much heart, and more than a little trouble and sorrow, can be deployed with such lightness, such delicacy of touch that it doesn't scare off even the most skittish emotions—that is the wonder of these poems.
We learn in the authors' bios at the back that William Kloefkorn has died while the book was being prepared for publication, and many of his poems are ripe with the knowledge of what's coming: "You know what you know./You are alone/a member of a group of signs and/symptoms//with a distinct connection to the sun/as it goes down. And down." Sound echoes sense: a mournful music of o's , oo's and ow's, and of repeated n's and m's—12 of the 30 letters in those lines. Yet at the end of "Sundown Syndrome," an opening out: "Inexorably is the adverb/ you think of, you// absolutely love. Because/ that is the way the world is// turning. Inexorably, and,/ always, as the song// you relish to remember says, / toward the morning."
. . .
The volume appropriately takes its title from Kloefkorn's poem, "A Moment of Delicate Balance," a singular instance which the book's title makes plural, referring as it does to what poetry can create. Beginning in the first person: "In the palm of my right hand, I hold my infant daughter," Kloefkorn then switches to the third person, in order to get enough distance to carry and let us see how much emotion he is feeling without drowning in it: "Note also the position of the father's free hand,/ how ready it is to save the day."
He also leavens this precarious, momentary joy with his characteristic laconic humor, giving us the mother wringing her hands at the child's danger, calling the father to "stop this foolishness this instant." The poem ends in a statement that seems to define poetry itself, that divine foolishness, when "for the moment there is the moment,// the delicate balance, daughter and father/ suspended, time unable to change/ what it brought to pass—the giddiness/of joy, the unrequited height/ of deep affection." There is poetry's lyric moment of timeless suspension, and of joy which does not require more than itself.
And there is love requited as well: the reader will find here memorable love poems of the long and deeply married, of which I mention "Loves," "Sacrament," and the brilliant, buoyant "Saturday, Early April," in which the "lilacs / at the edge of blooming" bring on (via Whitman) Abraham Lincoln, and, as the poem plays the changes on Lincoln's words in a delicious new context, the phrasing keeps going back as the lines go on, its syntax rocks, mirroring the pair in rocking chairs on their porch, who "return to our watching// and listening and rocking, each chair moving at its/ own independent pace, yet each a part/ of what maybe it means// to have formed, to be forming yet, and then no doubt/ to form, again and again and again,/ a more perfect union."
Kloefkorn's s plain speech ("Golden Years My Ass") comes with an internal music of sonic echoes that hides its artfulness, and with great subtlety of feeling and a beautifully and often playfully disguised complexity, entices with delight while provoking the reader to thought. "Because I have never seen an angel," says his poem "Angelology," "because/ I have serious doubts that they exist,/ I study them seriously,// parse them for what we have named and given them." And yes, it is precisely in the realm of invention and fiction that our deepest longings have the freest field of play, and reveal us most truly.
Which brings me to his storytelling friend, David Lee, about whom Kloefkorn's poem "Letter from a Longtime Friend" must have been written, as it describes so exactly what Lee does in the poems which comprise the second part of this book: "narratives delivered as poetry, their characters lifting/ themselves from the page/ to become the breath and the blood so familiar// to those whose breath and blood they share, some/ of them heroic, some pitiful, some hilarious...."
Lee shares with Kloefkorn a wise and irreverent comic spirit that carries the weight of human trouble and folly with deceptive ease. Both get the living voice to rise from print, but while Kloefkorn writes here in his own confiding voice, Lee invites in the voices of others, delivering everyday comedy/tragedy in the country vernacular for which, West Texas born, he has a pitch-perfect ear for speech wickedly funny with its bent grammar, natural metaphors, wild exaggeration and kick-ass directness. And like the kick of strong drink, the poems sneak up on you afterwards, and take you under.
After a lifetime of generating characters to show us ourselves, Lee is as fecund as ever in begetting these originals. And whether Odus Millard or Cleotis Ledbitter are actual or fictional just doesn't matter, the way his language makes them live. He can unravel a sentence down the length of a long stanza the way talk just rambles on, going off on tangents, coming back around, finding its way as it goes—as in part 3 of "Incident at Thompson Slough," which unfurls one sentence and its string of associations for 28 lines. Or this brief example where a train of thought is, as so often happens, momentarily derailed by another: "I really did save my dog/ and my wife/ before she died anyway/ of the thrombosis/ from probly getting killed/ and eat alive one night."
Lee leaves out the punctuation, which has the odd effect of making the reader actually hear the voices more distinctly, listen for the pauses, the way the ear picks up speech patterns, tones of voice and the seductive drama of bad things about to be told: "Ollie McDougald said all things considered/ which he admitted free and clear he hadn't/ next time he'd walk or hitchhike/ and if that nephew of his by marriage...." Reading these poems, you catch yourself reading out loud in your head, the poems are so voice- and story-driven, their high velocity breaking the usual literary speed limit—with the reckless joy that law violation adds to speed. Lee's poems break all the rules of propriety except sense, and leave the pieties as road-kill in the delightful and sometimes deadly actions of his no-better-than-they-should-be-honest-to-god characters.
Though Lee, like Kloefkorn, has an academic career behind him, he, also like his friend, wears his learning lightly. But there's evidence of it in the classical structure of tragedy which he employs in "Wheelis House: A Texas Tragedy," which reminds us that tragedy is not about high diction or ruling houses, but about mortal truth. The fall of Wheelis starts, not with the murder of a king, but with a fatal car wreck, and goes straight downhill from there.
And though David Lee has populated many books over the years with the colloquial eloquence of characters like those on display here, he has another voice ... lyrical, richly descriptive, intimate praise songs to the powerful beauty of the deserts, canyons and weathers of the West, in two books: So Quietly the Earth and Stone Wind Water. There is one such poem tucked in among the others in this collection, "Big Bend Triptych," which is a taste of that other voice, "... the quiet river/ a dream pathway/ for the waxing moon...." and which I mention to tempt readers to find those books which mediate, not the voices of other folks, but that of the land itself.
Friendship is perhaps poetry's most reliable muse, and here's to Wings Press for bringing together again these two masters of American poetry in a book which celebrates, not only one of the richest veins in our poetry, but an abiding and mutually nourishing friendship, in art and in life. This book of poems is, in the ultimate compliment of the publishing world, the pure tobacco.
About This Author
Read more about David Lee HERE.
