Book Review- sam fulmer

The book that I picked up at the library first grabbed my attention because it had a funky cover to look at so I figured that maybe the material inside might match the material on the outside. Maybe it would be something unique and show me something in poetry I have not see before. The book, Round the Poem Box: Rustic & Domesitc Home Movies for Stan & Jane Brakhage by David Meltzer, was indeed a very collection of poems that spanned topics from different aspects of life, different periods of time and displayed these situations in a variety of different styles. Many of the poems were really abstract and although we have read plenty of abstract poems throughout our semester, I felt like the word choice from word to word was like nothing I have read before. Meltzer is not afraid to put words together in sequences that seem like they have no place being together in a line, or moreover, a sentence. For example, the poem called I'm Greedy. I lie. I cheat. I'm afraid of failure. Is it true I also steal? features four lines that read, "into exploding grave plots overtime furnace engines streak God's mouth with flesh smoke." The poem was speaking about city lights and I think it was alluding to crime in certain cities and the death toll that comes with it, so the context made sense but I was very surprised/impressed with the compilation of words that came together in order to present such a graphic and dark picture of a world wreaking of death. I think this type of language combined with such a suggestive title, as the poem most definitely has, opens up the reader to the style of poetry that Meltzer is going to be writing.
His poetry continues throughout the book with a similar tone to that of this last poem and I think it helps keep the poem together as opposed to being viewed as a collection various randomly themed poems. The ominous tone that Meltzer uses is this one poem can be seen in a majority of the following poems in the book. Some of the poems are short and abrupt with there message being put out rather blatantly, while others give the same straight forward plot hints with the use of longer sentences and more use of conjunctions to make the poems read a little more fluidly. Other poems that were supposed to be almost abbreviated, if you can level with me and think of them this way, were much harder to read and took a lot more time to really be able to extract the true meaning or themes within the poem.
The collection of poems of David Meltzer have one thing in common overall and that is that he seems to be largely a poet who uses unrhymed schemes. There may be some slant rhymes that are hard to dig out of the poems, but as I read I found it more obvious that Meltzer likes to work with poetry that is more disjunctive and the rhyming or set up of it is not as important. It was fun to look through a book of poetry that is all from one person, it allows them to portray themes through numerous poems and it allows them to work with their own writing tone in more than one single poem. I'm not sure if I would read this book of poems again, but I would recommend it to someone because it was something new that captured me.