Muddling Through
This is what a light-verse collection should be: it entertains a variety of forms, it does not eschew silliness, but it also doesn't give in to chaos or predictable jokes. It's an erudite book even as there are poems about autodidacts, and—the best and most Seinfeldian part—it tells you things you feel you should have known but have never taken the time to think about—for example, that ghosts require training:
"Yes, haunting is an art," my teacher said.
"You mustn't be too obvious, too crude.
They'll think it's all a trick, or caused
by natural tremors, earthquakes and the like,
and what you want above all other things
is to be certain that they know it's you."
Schorb uses the familiar as both subject and model. "Late Night Rap of Soul and Body" is a modern answer to Yeats, who took himself far too seriously anyway, and "A Tumble for Skelton" gives poor old John a tunning of his own. "News of 45" (the age, not the president) evokes e e cummings in its punctuationless juxtaposition of images.
Most surprisingly, there are prose poems in here that are quite funny. "An Experiment in Governance," pushes absurdity to the point that it's completely believable in our present bizarre moment. "Last Exit to East Hampton" reads like a concentrated drop of Dorothy Parker's "Lady With a Lamp," with a dash of West Egg thrown in for flavor.
The diadem in this book can be found in a series of seven sonnets collectively titled "Symbols." Each poem addresses a Christian symbol, from the cross to the lamb. While this may sound very serious, the application of a light-verse touch actually enhances the explanations. Among these poems, "The Fish" tests the capacity of the form and finds it roomy enough for two entirely separate stories. The octet gives the history of the symbol, tying it, eventually, to the Spanish Inquisition. The sestet compacts the story of St. Peter into six lines, finishing the etymological loftiness of the first stanza with the homeliness to which all Christian symbols should remain tethered. That this homeliness is wrapped in a pun is kind of perfect:
St. Peter was a fisherman, they say,
and one day caught a sole and then another
and soon his bobbing boat was full of fish.
All soles, he said, are one another's brother
(most women were excluded in his day),
And, rinsing it with wine, he cleaned his dish.
The rest of this book engages the literary, the bawdy, and the surreally urinary (trust me on that one). Beyond its obvious skill, the feeling that comes through most clearly is a respect for the versatility of light verse—the forms it can be found in and the subjects it will accommodate.
—Barbara Egel, Light Magazine