Jeffrey H. MacLachlan

A Reviews of F. Daniel Rzicznek’s Neck of the WorldNeck of the World, F. Daniel Rzicznek, Logan, Utah, Utah State University Press, 2007, 64 pages, $15.95, Cloth.

Katie Barker’s recent review of Clive Barker’s Opal Sunset is entitled “A Poet for Poet Haters.”  I’m not exactly sure why someone who hates poets would automatically be won over by a single book, but Ms. Baker seems confident enough.  Equally outrageous is the blurb by Jane Mead regarding Neck of the World, F. Daniel Rzicznek’s stunning first collection, “In these tattered and shameful times, it enlarges the spirit to find poems of such expansive inseeing…the metaphors are so incisive they leave one with a renewed sense of the enduring relationship between things.”  Apparently these days a book of poetry cannot simply be enjoyed – it must win over those that revile poetry in addition to preserving global economics.

Winner of the Mary Swenson Poetry Award, Neck of the World is an apt title to bring these lofty expectations back down to Earth.  Rather than rely on gimmicks or the same tired phrases again and again, this book creates a world that’s unique to the author — a place of shadowy fields and foggy orchards — perfect for reading as the season turns brisker.  The first indication of a descent intothis world is the title of the second poem, “A Mouthful of Crickets.”  “How do you expect to die,” he writes as the first line, “with a song like that, with a riot / of black fiddles among your teeth?”  The poem concludes with a surprising command from the speaker – instead of confronting the monster, it simply says, “Close up. / Something gleams when you speak.”  Not only does this leave the reader with the mouth filled with crickets looming, but the final two sentences ease out like fine bow strokes.

This book’s greatest strength, and what every book of poems aspires to do, is to look at common things so freshly that your brain always conjures these fresh words.  Describing a bear’s face in “Within Within” Rzicznek writes, “The bear pauses long / enough to shine a dense industry / of triangular teeth.”  The word industry triggers the image of factories of tiny people polishing and sharpening each tooth.  “Donnybrook” begins with “A gash of winter road” alluding to slick turns filled with collisions.  The aforementioned bear returns in “Hibernacula” and drinks from a river described as “one long diamond of sleep.”  With these five words, the once destructive bear is now a docile creature enjoying a beautiful strip of woods.  Later in “Book of Letters Reversed” Rzicznek sets the scene of a man and a woman walking at night – “Floating glovelike / in the moonlight three geese sharpen/their bodies along fake terraces of wind.”  These three gorgeous lines give the poem simultaneously a foreground and background image – the geese and the white gloves of the woman.

Much like an album, books of poetry can often end on a poor note due to bad decision making with regards to order.  Again, Neck of the World passes this test with “Astral.”  With the book extremely focused on dark countryside, this poem leaves the reader with the message that even though poems today do not generate much broad sympathy, like nature they will continue undeterred.

Between silence and wooden
clap of door, there exist
various routes: you drive off

toward sleep and Orion hesitates
past my roof – its drip
a speech, and speech the train

two blocks east, shriller
than before: a newborn arrow
 of air that billows, increases

to familial, moans calm into fields
 as space around the town lifts
like a monk ever at dying.

This whole living we’ve been
within the arms and legs.  The level,
fixed light of our pores

whitens, shifts under.  The body:
the outside minting allergies –
the inner snowing, and so old.

The speech of the fields, constellations, and trains are only heard by the speaker who transcribes it for the reader.  The speaker isn’t hell-bent on taking the publishing world by storm nor concerned with things beyond his control.  The speaker is simply content in capturing this quiet world — enjoying a body that has been slowly chugging along for ages.