Picture With Moving Parts - Book Review

This small book of poetry is an antidote to any number of misconceptions about the art of making language sing. Writers who steer the genre into such dead ends as "self-expression" and "narrative structure" will experience Rick London’s work like a glass of cold water in the face. Hard-core poetry fans will be delighted to come across this tender shock of undiluted lyricism. The title, Picture With Moving Parts, says a lot about London’s agenda: He’s an imagist with a strong sense of the book-length series, making poems that interact from syllable to syllable, line to line and page to page, the whole becoming a piece of literary chamber music, a conceptual sonata for his solo voice. Though the former Detroiter has lived in San Francisco for decades and is associated with the Language poets in the Bay Area, he has always maintained close ties, both poetical and political, with the Motor City. These local roots give him what might be called a philosophical purpose, as if writing was an act of compassion, a sharing of uniquely verbal understanding with a community of readers. Doorjamb Press, which also publishes the poetry journal Dispatch Detroit, gives Picture an impeccable look, a trademark of editor-publisher Christine Monhollen’s approach. With a lovely cover photograph by Martha Waters and an airy layout (despite its small size), the collection feels like a pocket companion, a book to carry with you on the road back into the world. moving what (the) body lets you hear/ what it keeps to itself invitation to a vanishing point nothing coincides with memory the body feels its way along a wall moves in (the) small breaks where a door continues to open the eye sees what it can The American precursors to this work are pretty clear — William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Robert Creeley — but London does honor to this experimental lineage. And all along, as he ponders the sounds of the words, we hear him unmistakably.

DOORJAMB PRESS