Truth and Love

The tenth anniversary of Breakfast at Denny’s, which is available on Amazon…

Book Review by Michael Bassett:

I just finished reading Jim McGarrah’s book, Breakfast at Denny’s (Ink Brush Press, ISBN# 978-0983971-580, 15.00, 2013). I highly recommend it even for people who think they do not like contemporary poetry. It is simultaneously lyrical, brutal, gritty, prophetic, wry, and warm. A rebellious cry for facing ugly truths both personal and historical, this book is also a bluesy invitation to embrace the desire-drunk, wounded, absurd struggles and strivings of humanity. Marge, the mother who reads the news every day to her vegetative son, declares, “We’re all collateral damage in God’s design […] it’s the price we must pay for being human.”

In the opening poem, ”Interstate 24” the speaker claims “Like a shark, inertia drives me crazy,” and to be sure Jim McGarrah’s mind is on the move full of a restless energy even in still moments. The poems in this collection are memory-haunted and “One thing leads to another in a nostalgic mind” (“Icons”).          In some poems the confrontation is with memory both personal and collective and the continued injustices and horrors that stain America, as in “On the Streets of Saigon in the 21st Century After Reading a U.S. Court Decision Finding the Makers of Agent Orange Not responsible For Birth Defects in Vietnamese Children”At other times the poems seem to address the twin truths of the irresistible pull of desire and dreams and the inedibility of heartbreak.

“The fear of being trapped by boredom drove us crazy./It festered in our guts till/ this curdled milk of small town ennui—the idea/that happiness is always somewhere else—steered us/ separate ways to larger cities and more exotic dreams”

 “Somewhere, hidden deep in everyone, there’s a memory that will destroy dreams.”

These poems are not only chronicles of cultural change but meditations on perpetual perishing. Even readers born before or after McGarrah’s generation can resonate with poems like “My Childhood is Dead—Long Live My Childhood.”

 “Fifty years have passed since I first stuck a piece / of Wrigley’s Spearmint to the bottom of a seat/ to kiss a girl named Pam while Elmer Fudd stuttered/ through my self-conscious pubescence. Once,/ some businessman partitioned the main floor/ into four separate screens without vision of a future where memory and imagination, fractious brothers/ that they are, might play, free in a world full of cell phones and iPads outside the doors./ Now, I’m driving past the movie house one last time./ the marquee’s busted, the doors are sealed with plywood,/ but the scent of popcorn rushes in the car’s open window.”

In one of the stories in her collection “Self-Help” Lorrie Moore has a mother tell her daughter that “Love is art not truth.” McGarrah’s poems superimpose the two. The poems urge us to love the art of living of being in the world in a certain way full of awareness and vitality. There is an unrelenting accusation though, a constant reminder of our capacity to bullshit ourselves and others.          In “A Savage Cup of Coffee” the speaker is suspicious of his refined romantic sensibilities in his musings on an attractive barista.

“her glide between the coffee machine and the pastry case, like a ballerina in sneakers one second and a stripper on a pole the next, flogs my old blood into adolescent frenzy. When she breaks and sits next to me, knees tucked beneath her chin as calyx for the blossom of her face, cinnamon overwhelms the room” “This is all romantic crap—really.”

You will be well rewarded living in these poems where history is irony not melodrama and love is the art of coping with the truths that are deeper and higher than our politics, philosophies and justifying narratives.