The Late Parade
Poems
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A debut collection that welcomes a new modernist aesthetic for the twenty-first century.
Aswirl with waking dreams and phantom memories, The Late Parade is a triumph of poetic imagination. To write about one thing, you must first write about another. In Adam Fitzgerald's debut collection, readers discover forty-eight poems that yoke together tones playful and elegiac, nostalgic and absurd. Fitzgerald's shape-shifting inspirations "beckon us to join an urban promenade" (McLane) with a multiplicity of chimerical stops: from the unreal cities of Dubai to the former Soviet Union, from Nigerian spammers and the Virgin Mary to Dr. Johnson and Cat Power.
"The glory of this volume is the long title poem, which carries the primal vision of Hart Crane into a future that does not surrender the young poet’s love of the real," writes Harold Bloom. Mash-ups of litanies, monologues and odes, these poems spring from a modernist landscape filled with madcap slips of tongue, innuendo, archaisms and everyday slang. Though Fitzgerald's lines often hallucinate meanings that feel open-ended, they never ignore the traditional pleasures of poetic craft and memory, their music an ambient drone—part Technicolor, part nitrous oxide.
Even so, what glues these fantasies together is more than the charm of the maddeningly chameleon rhetoric. Fitzgerald's sonorous voice is unabashedly that of a love poet's: melancholic, baroque and visionary. The Late Parade is a testament to the powers of confusion, which may disguise our sense of loss but offer in return that eloquent tonic known as poetry. As Richard Howard writes, "When the new poet turns up the heat, he gives us just the necessary outrages which make us understand what we never knew we could say."
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Busy, ornate and elaborate, evasive in their sense, yet charged with emotion, the poems of Fitzgerald's debut could get quick attention: "If my markings were a liberal-minded act/ in this splooge of too-mobled monuments,/ they'd first have to convene at a hospital amphitheatre," he announces in a poem with a provocative opening: "I didn't always have this douchebag haircut." The hyper-contemporary language may seem to ride in Michael Robbins's tailwind, and yet Fitzgerald's other modes come off less ironic than erotic, urgent, crowded with declarations, anxious for love, intensely aware of poetry's past. "Quatrains, peaches and rivers had once/ been the clock of his invariable hours," one quatrain begins, and even a poem with the unpromising title "Nigerian Spammer" pauses for unlikely welcomes: "Come, friend, zoomorphic as you are,/ Kind to ruins, casually enclosed in space." Fitzgerald tries almost too hard to remain in and of his own time, and yet his gestures point back to such earlier urban Romantics as Hart Crane (indeed, Fitzgerald runs the @HartCrane Twitter feed). Detractors may wonder how much new substance there is behind Fitzgerald's surfaces; partisans who may compare him to Crane, or even to David Foster Wallace will accept his invitations: "Creep through this room in a dirty gondola// with chimes under level-headed clouds:/ that's enough, facetiousness aside."
