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Review by Off the Shelf Correspondent Dennis Daly

Spectral power belongs to ages and cultures long past. But here and there evidence emerges of its elusive endurance in the form of poetic techniques such as projection and personalization. Here imagination (Cotton Mather aficionados take notice) provides the proper venue with insight, empathy, and understanding as value added attachments. In his new book of poetry, The Biographer, David M. Katz haunts his set of chosen characters with his mnemonic underpaintings. He merges his rich emotional values with the objective facts of his characters, real or fictional.

Katz’s first poem, His Last Book, hooked me with its third person objectification of the artist getting old. Sentimentality and emotional pain are met head on. But they are contained and given purpose. Rather than bathos and mawkishness, the poet elicits an identifiable hard-bitten reality that one can recognize immediately. The poet introduces his protagonist empathically and with reflective preciseness,

The Biographer Poems by David M. Katz
Dos Madres PressLoveland, Ohio
www.dosmadres.com
ISBN: 978-1-962847-07-0
71 Pages

… he realized

He was no longer young. He recognized
A periodic feebleness of mind,
A lack of balance, tendency to slip
And wobble in his steps, rise in the night
Repeatedly to pee: of scant concern
In themselves, these irksome little symptoms,
Annoying as mosquito bites,
Together made it seem to him as if
There were just two things in the universe
That mattered: his life and the end of it…

In his poem, The Altitude, Katz fills in the unknowable (read spectral) blanks between father and son. The speaker, no older than five, looks up the length of his father and nurtures the beginnings of an evolutionary understanding of the man. A moment of drama creates a mnemonic guidepost on which the son attaches facts – both real and quasi-imaginary. Here is the heart of the poem,

… Suddenly I pitched
Forward like a ship, the mica chips
In concrete hurtling up at me before
My arm grew taut. My father’s hand had held
Me back from falling, though he didn’t seem
To notice, and we took a slow next step.
My eyes rose up and saw, beneath his hat,
A jaw, a nose, and something like a smile.

Generally, I am not fond of poems dealing with substance abuse, alcoholism or otherwise. Are You Still Drinking, Dad?, Katz’s piece on this very subject, jolted me beyond any personal biases. Dealing with the disease’s phenomenon of quitting and relapse, Katz ghosts his persona with both unspoken and spoken connections that re-live intense, emotional hurts. But it is more than that. Missed opportunities caused by human failings are the bedrock of mortality. This Shakespearean sonnet is, pardon the expression, top shelf and my favorite poem in the collection. The last lines nail the irreversible pain and are not to be missed in any review. So here they are,

… He might have had one shot,
A rye to ease the future shock a bit;
Sweet Gypsy Rose; cheap peach or apricot
Liqueur. I said I’d be a father soon,
And he was miles away across the phone
On some highway with a cowboy tune
Fading behind. He always drank alone.
It’s now or never, Dad, I might have said.
Before my son was born my dad was dead.

Tread-worn spooks flitter past, still in grand context, but not as certain, not as noble in Katz’s mysterious poem The Code, written in memory of John le Carre. The real world is fading into the spectral by half and the activities of the spectral seem confused and leaderless. The poet has withdrawn his added details and leaves his audience in the dark or to their own Kafkaesque devices. The poem opens this way,

They were muttering in half-understood languages,
Half-wanting to be known, half wanting to know,
Half not and half-not. They were in the lobby,
Exchanging the code, partly overheard, the bellhops
Inured to it by now as they hustled
To the ever-ringing bell in their tight red coats…

Notice, everything appears compromised in this piece except the bell, which seems to signal the need for intervention.

Katz’s title poem and masterwork, The Biographer, A Verse Novella, spans twenty-six pages of compelling and imaginative narrative. The poet outdoes himself. He first creates a persona worthy of his truly American story. Then he essentially possesses the persona, not in a hostile way, but in a way that merges both biographer and subject in a dual adventure of creation and kaleidoscopic life.

Telling the story of an abandoned foundling, adopted on board ship on the way to Ellis Island, Katz’s persona intimates her techniques of biography referring to her subject’s newly found (and soon lost) parents,

… While Shmuel gazed, Ida
longed desperately to be off her feet. Their
Internal lives
are of course, my own creation, as is
the bulk
of any biography, a story
based
on a handful of facts. I have seen,
in fact, a creased,
anonymous photo of a pushcart
from that time
with a grimfaced father, mother, and
little girl posed
in front of it…

Katz’s narrative continues in a rapid, almost dream-like fashion, elucidating the life of vagabondage, independence, fame and activism. The reader, along for the ride, can do nothing but marvel at both the external and internal goings-on.

From beginning to end this superb book of poems illuminates the magical sum and substance of human nature, as well as the importance of soulful imagination at the heart of even the most objective life histories, or their fictional and spectral counterparts.