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The Literary Desk · Review · Issue 7

Niall O'Sullivan reviews August Kleinzahler's The Strange Hours Travelers Keep

Niall O'Sullivan · August Kleinzahler

Niall O'Sullivan reviews The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, a collection by the American poet August Kleinzahler published by Faber and Faber at 9.99 pounds. He gives his verdict at the start so the reader need not hunt for it, and he is enthusiastic. Admirers of Kleinzahler's fast, conversational, detailed style will find the same ingredients as before, including found poems, rough city scenes and sly cultural allusions, but delivered with greater force.

O'Sullivan contrasts Kleinzahler with poets who write calm meditations from a safe distance. Kleinzahler, he says, plunges into the dirt and noise of ordinary life. The fragments of 'Montreal' serve as his first example, with their grubby bedroom and a sound that hits the street and settles like sediment. He then looks at the title poem, in which a ride on satellite data between stock markets turns financial trading into a natural phenomenon, comparable to a flock of starlings, without any sermon on capitalism. The poem ends with a woman parallel parking, her thinking locked in a tango of ambiguity and reason.

A sequence called 'A History of Western Music' holds the book together. Its opening scene, a party of artists and hangers-on outside an Italian restaurant, is silenced when a young mezzo-soprano begins to sing, and O'Sullivan reads it as a neat statement that art can be powerful even when its makers are flawed. Later poems include a private beatification of Liberace, a man imagining a Paris jazz band, a lift where a 1950s recording plays, and a photograph of musicians who seem to wave at the viewer. O'Sullivan stresses that where Kleinzahler's speakers stand matters less than where their imaginations go.

He ends with advice: some poems hit at once and others grow on rereading, and the book is worth buying in hardback because it will be read repeatedly. A reader deciding whether to try Kleinzahler will find a clear, personal case here.

Work
The Strange Hours Travelers Keep
Author
August Kleinzahler
Publisher
Faber and Faber

Poems in this selection

  • Montreal
  • The Strange Hours Travelers Keep
  • A History of Western Music

It's the finest collection so far from one of America's most important living poets.

Niall O'Sullivan, The Wolf, issue 7
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