BETWEEN REASON AND DESIRE: A review of
So One Could Have by Mark Salerno
ISBN 1-888996-86-2
In Mark Salerno’s latest book of poetry, So One Could Have, the details pile up like the moments of an extraordinary day. What we have in this book is a casually scientific exegesis on the passage of time. In lesser hands this tall order might have become an exercise in tedium, but Salerno pulls this off in a most deceptively simple and likable way with these sonnets, using repetition to enact what constitutes a nearly cinema verite effect. This ebb and flow in Salerno’s new book provides a real sense of what is true of the fluid nature of human consciousness. Existence entails a constant process of redefinition. This book achieves that superlatively.
Any given day, for most denizens of earth, is a harried series of moments. The challenge is to not only move through life with aplomb and accomplish something but also to add up these moments and decipher any supposed meaning. The relative aspect of human existence aside, good art is unflinchingly good at representing some facet of a communal reality or a reality so personal it becomes communal—without moralizing. This said reality may be represented as completely irrational and fantastic, banal and predictable, or somewhere uniquely in between—the skill lies in recording it faithfully and then stepping aside. Salerno is a subtle master of stepping aside and satisfying the aforementioned criteria.
One thing that makes this book so interesting is Salerno’s use of caesura.
I used to be feeling now I am a penny arcade
(from “Small World,” p. 27)
These are poems that use monolithic pauses to accentuate moods and ground each thought. Nearly after each wisp of observation comes a forceful void, which outlines the music of these lines like the vibratory lines in a Mondrian painting. Not that these poems are static—on some level I was reminded of sonnets in the classical sense in that they address some illusory “other”—they are in fact very fluid and positively hum with the seemingly liquid, lifelike quality that denotes consciousness. In “Pink’s” (p. 59) Salerno states
In seeing one thing we probably see many
wherein I gathered all my passing moments
to reconstruct a bibelot and a merely stupid
O befuddled longing O track of wonder
Salerno does seem to see many things at once and his poetry allows the reader to experience a similar luxury. This book is a photo lab of discrete stock-piled images. Salerno seems to instinctively know how to post-modernly question what most have accepted as foundations of Western humanism with the nonchalance of a sleight-of-hand man.
we awake as good as another from dreams
I hate that Picasso and Newton screwed up
science and the Renaissance was a mistake
I love the light before the blue and the
time it takes to be here it is the role
(“Small World,” p. 27)
Salerno’s reticence is not overpowering, however; it seems to be more of a beginning than an ending for him. His dispassionate attitude seems to be more of a harnessing of power and a summing-up rather than a giving-up or a defeat. These poems detonate somewhere between despair and revelation in a middle ground that is somewhat alluring and mysterious.
The inversion of thought and image in some of Salerno’s best lines is what lends the work in this volume a somewhat cinematic quality.
she said nice little town you got here
sheriff with eyes on the stranger logic
wanted the big hit the big grab and skip
over the border it’s a helluva country
to be modern in cottonwoods and damp cuffs
a building falls down but the sky stays put
(“Coda,” p. 69)
There is a disheveled beauty in the immediacy of this book, but the downside of that is sometimes this reviewer felt perhaps some of these lines rely a bit too much on a journalistic impulse. Usually, at moments such as these in So One Could Have, however, the poet’s idiosyncratic method serves to bring the reader quickly back around—whatever slack or uninteresting strophes are compensated for by another apt turn of phrase which surely follows.
Repeated quips and worthy quotes (such as an occasional cut from Shakespeare) abound in So One Could Have. Salerno is searching in these lines for something perhaps illusory. The reader will be washed with a Berriganesque cavalcade of sensory impressions upon immersion in this book. What one is left with is a faithful rendering of the inherent mystery of a life, lived in the minute details, yet encompassing multitudes.