Review by Irene Koronas
Pleasure Trout
Gloria Mindock
Copyright © 2013 by Gloria Mindock
Muddy River Books
Brookline MA
Softbound, 42 pages, $7.00
“I'm a strange woman-
You can see this from my scratched heart”
Pleasure Trout presents the fanciful seriousness poetry
often offers in an age of crisis. Mindock knows how to
place words in verse. Each poem adds humor and seriousness
just as surrealism and the Dadaist did:
“Chances are I'm slender and
love great atoms and marble
men anointed with
a diaphragm that mixes
itself with bronze...”
Her verse is fanciful and dramatic. After several readings
we come to understand the author’s approach to poetry.
How ridiculous some experiences are. How splendor
is an artificial sweetener as well as a poetic word. I'm
reminded of the Dadaist writers, especially Hans Arp,
who was both a painter and a poet, often the two were done
simultaneously. Deconstructing experiences and constructing
from the threat of war. The constant threat of war led the Dada
writers and actors to proclaim and appear to be foolish
'banterers', dancing to their stress related environment,
stepping into the sublime instead of relating to the actual
threats and actual strife of living during war times:
“Every hour a new one elected
Still no word
A look, a suffering, a love
to keep outsiders out
as light bulbs trace
this guard of personal
handling-
this possessiveness...
Sometimes we all sit in a
circle
hovering in a cave
This trespasser must be
sought!
Every second the crying of
a wolf emerges inside one of us”
I'm inspired and I'm blown away by the profound agony
in the poems. How miss-translations can lend credence
to our time and to the times past. Gloria's sentences do
not end with a period. Each sentence starts with capitalization.
Some of her verse uses ! exclamation to end the sentence
and an occasional question mark emphasizes the importance
the verse exclaims, how important word juxtaposition implies
meaning or the lack of meaning which also insinuates through
the lack of meaning the deconstruction of meaning. An endless
repetition of meanings:
“Unless you know me, you don't”
Pleasure Trout is the best experimental writing done in this
century, (in my humble opinion.) If that doesn't get you to
run to read, then, “It is pointless/So gruesome/ Is this
urban life?”
Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor: Wilderness House Literary Review
Reviewer: Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene