Saturday, February 06, 2010

Odes to Tools


I received a chapbook in the mail yesterday: Dave Bonta's Odes to Tools. Beautifully done. I thought I'd glance through, find a couple of my favorites, quote a few good lines. What's easier than writing a review of a good little book? It practically writes itself.

Well, first I'd find my favorites. I remembered some of them, and went right to them. “Ode to a Compass”:

...what to do
about that pinhole
at the center of the paper?

* * *

The compass is a crutch.
Restore its missing leg
so it can return to
its first life as
a gnomon:
stationary,
circled by the sun.


Yep. Still there. Better than I remembered: “a seed for a stone,” was that line in it when I read it on Via Negativa? So I'd just leaf through now to the “Ode to a Shovel,” quote a few more lines, and I'd be...

Wait a minute. “Ode to a Coping Saw”? I don't remember that. I laugh aloud at the end of it:

somehow
it copes.


And then, the “Ode to a Hive Tool”:

You need a key for entering where there is no door.
You are too much full of your mammal self
to fit through the always-open entryway
& in any case would have no idea
how to execute a waggle dance,
which looks like sun-drugged madness to you,
looming over the brood box with your angry halo
.

Another one I'd missed, somehow. Oh, but here's the Scissors! “We are rich. We have three pairs of scissors.”

I got lost, on my way to the Shovel, discovering, rediscovering. How can you get lost, in a thirty page book? But I did. All these poems have edges, teeth. It's a brilliant collection.

I realized along the way that there's nothing more difficult than writing a review of a good little book: a review that did it justice would be longer than the book, a patent absurdity.

We are rich. I'm so happy to have this little book. Why on earth would you read a review of it? Just get it.

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