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David Kirby's The Ha-Ha
BY JON GARELICK
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David Kirby’s new book of poems is funny, but it’s also more than funny, and even the title is deceptive. The Ha-Ha (Louisiana State University Press, 64 pages, $22.95 hardcover; $15.95 paperback) draws its name from a visual trick of landscape architecture popular in 18th-century England, "a sunken fence used to keep cows at a picturesque distance/from the manor house so they can be seen grazing on the greensward/kept by the ha-ha/from trampling the lawn and mooing at the guests." In Kirby’s poetry, the ha-ha becomes a "structure against . . . chaos," as are the poems themselves. Kirby generally favors straightforward narrative sentences arranged in short three- or four-line stanzas, and straightforward narrative poems (and narrative poems they are, not lyric, as the poet tells a group of Rotarians in "Borges at the Northside Rotary," "of the kind performed/by, not that I am in any way comparing myself/to them, Homer, Dante, and Milton"). But verb tenses, time frames, language, and story lines shift ceaselessly, like consciousness itself, like the poet’s mind as one recollection intrudes on another, or as he uses one anecdote to supplant terror, as a ha-ha to distract attention from "a hideously inappropriate memory." Kirby will get, say, three story lines going, three groups of images, three metaphors, juggle them deftly, and bring them together in a finale that’s as surprising, as open-ended, as it is inevitable and right. In "The Ha-Ha, Part I: The Tao of Bo Diddley," the poet visits his in-laws’ home in Hawaii, weaving Bo Diddley, the disappearance of two Danish backpackers, and his father-in-law’s story about a WWII kamikaze pilot, before reaching, at about midpoint, the poems’ psychological center: "Sometimes I think I’ve read/just about everything written on the subject of death,/but I still don’t get it." In the final stanzas, the poet diverts himself with cameos by Emerson, Kevin Spacey, and García Márquez (quoting genius being another kind of ha-ha), before returning to the kamikaze pilot and a kind of apotheosis. Besides Oahu, Kirby visits Italy and France, which gives him a chance to play jokes with mis-translation, but with resonant payoffs (in one poem, an Evian bottle sets up a punch line that doesn’t arrive for four pages). The book is cleverly designed with a collage-like use of cow images, closer to us than a ha-ha would allow, and a series of epigraphs (from the likes of Pynchon and Patrick Kavanaugh, Austen and Campbell McGrath), that, unlike most epigraphs, actually get used in the poems. Kirby’s poetry is a comic slaughterhouse where nothing goes to waste.
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