If you don’t know whether you like contemporary American poetry that doesn’t adhere to a formal rhyme scheme, this isn’t particularly polite, that seeks an honest explication of what it means to be human, and if you don’t know whether or not you like Jim McGarrah, then you might possibly find the answer to both those questions by reading “A Balancing Act: New and Selected Poems, 1998-2018.” Either way, you’ll learn something you didn’t know before. So, it won’t be a waste of time. And, I could use the money from book sales to pay off a bar tab.
A Balancing Act – review by Katherine Hoerth, (Southeast Texas Examiner, entertainment magazine page 30, October 11, 2018)
“Can poetry matter? It’s a question that critics have grappled with for centuries, but perhaps more poignantly since the early 1990’s when Dana Gioia, in his now infamous essay in The Atlantic, wrote that America has effectively declared poetry dead. It was becoming too far removed from everyday life and everyday people. Jim McGarrah’s recent collection of poetry, A Balancing Act, challenges this notion and responds with a resounding, thundering yes. Poetry not only matters, the book argues, but it’s essential, vital, and can save our lives. A Balancing Act takes us through the cultural backroads of America and explores how our culture has (and hasn’t) changed during his lifetime. Readers are ushered through a post-World War II childhood, the speaker’s Beat-influenced rebellious teenage years, into the jungles and the battlefields of Vietnam during the 1960’s, and finally, back home to a changing America. During this fast-paced journey through time, McGarrah, a poet, professor, and Vietnam veteran, examines both his past and our nation’s, striking a difficult balance between patriotism and skepticism, nostalgia and realism, hope and despair. Poetry serves as a means of reflection, a tool for looking back at both the beauty and the tragic moments that make up our lives, so we can come to terms with, understand, and learn from them to grow, both collectively as a nation and individually as human beings. I admire his vision, his stark honesty, and the intangible power of his words. Many poems in the collection explore the speaker’s childhood and his parents. Growing up in Postwar America, which was a time of prosperity and optimism, McGarrah examines these memories with a sharp eye. In “My Childhood is Dead—Long Live My Childhood” a movie house becomes a symbol of the speaker’s past, the days when “Old Ike” promised a sort of suburbia utopia of “a picket fence, low mortgage rates, / processed foods, dial phones, and prosperous peace.” And while this all sounds wonderful, the speaker is quick to remind his readers of the truth: “We ignored the cruel whiteness of his pledge / because we were white.” Then, he goes on to describe the movie house, a place of adolescent joy, wonder, and discovery, a “shelter of fantasy” where he kissed “a girl named Pam while Elmer Fudd stuttered his way / through [his] self-conscious pubescence,” though today, it’s busted, the doors sealed with plywood, and “a wrecking ball is swinging from the arm of a crane / and the hint of stale popcorn rushes in the car’s window.” Here, McGarrah strikes that perfect balance between nostalgia and reality. In “How We Were What We Never Became,” McGarrah explores the implications of the rebellious “Hippie” generation that he was a part of, the sons and daughters of World War II veterans who were “all magic—all wind and fire, red blood and thunder / freedom and love.” However, world peace didn’t come, and this generation both fought and protested the Vietnam war. The poem ends with the speaker holding his ear to a conch shell to “listen as the ocean’s waves / roar within its hol- low center, and the magic changes nothing.” In the center of this substantial collection of poetry sits a chapter about the speaker’s experiences in Vietnam during the war. As a reader, though these were the most difficult to read for their subject matter, they were also the most powerful and poignant. For example, the poem “Eating with Chopsticks in Vietnam” describes this every day, simple moment between a group of young soldiers sharing a meal that gets disrupted by an ambush and unthinkable violence. One moment the soldiers are “laughing” balancing grains of rice “between those two sticks of wood” when suddenly, the air fills “with sweat and ginger” as a sniper steadies his rifle “in the fork of a rubber tree.” The juxtaposition of life and death, violence and joy, laughter and fear make this poem incredibly powerful, human, and necessary. The poem “On Veterans Day a Vietnam Veteran Reads the Names of American Soldiers Killed in the Iraqi War,” the speaker describes the overwhelming feeling of having to read the names of fallen soldiers. At first, they feel like anonymous syllables, “drifting like unmoored buoys / through the current of moist air,” but in the middle of the poem, they become much more: “Names play baseball / watch movies, walk hand in hand with teenaged lovers.” They become human, and the price of war becomes evident to both speaker and reader. The poem ends with a haunting image of “perfect bodies ripped apart, reappearing for a moment, / disappearing whole in the blankness of the turning page.” The poem, however, works against that disappearing, and they become memorialized, human, and real. That’s the true power of poetry. And to really drive the point home about poetry’s importance, some poems explore our contemporary cultural landscape and political issues with that stark honesty. McGarrah holds a mirror up to the American present and asks us to take a long look at who we are. He asks us— would our past selves, who’ve sacrificed so much, be proud of who we are today? In “Posse Comitatis from Standing Rock—Winter 2016,” the answer is ‘probably not.’ The speaker describes his father, a World War II war hero who “rarely questioned / the leaders of his free world or the need for law / and order” who felt ashamed when “soldiers / rushed a line of Kent State students and shot / four dead because they refused our newest war.” That same sentiment “clouds the daybreak … above the bridge of North Dakota Highway 18” when protestors of the pipeline’s construction were shot with water cannons. The speaker wonders what his father would think and postulates: He would concede, I’m sure, that history has wasted its breath on us, That a fog of ancient fears is wanting to be burned Alive by the rituals of power meant to bank the flames. A Balancing Act is an ambitious collection of poetry. It takes on the biggest of subjects from war, love, death, regret, and hope, but McGarrah, a talented and thoughtful poet, strikes an almost-impossible balance here and puts on display the true power of poetry. Indeed, this poetry matters.”
Jim McGarrah, Author 