This poet’s first collection appeared from Norton in 2008 when he turned 40. It’s titled Yellowrocket, after the plant – some call it a weed – that appears on the upper plains of the American Middle West. In this case, it’s in central Wisconsin, from the dark soil near Marshfield where the poet was born and grew up, from where he departed as a young man – and occasionally revisits. So this new book, Pitch, appearing in early 2012 from the same American publisher, is no less resonant, if not more so.
The title poem refers to a family treasure, an old Steinway piano that Boss’s father was hauling somewhere in a pickup truck during winter. He made too quick a turn and the piano “pitched” onto the ground, although surprisingly intact afterward. In a tightly strung four-part poem, Boss speculates not unkindly about his father’s subconscious attitude. With alternately indented lines of a single space, the poet remembers:
Freud would say he did it on purpose –
my father who couldn’t hold a tune
if it had handles, reins,
and a canvas
shoulder harness –
that he towed the inscrutable implement
a hundred miles and then,
on the last one,
took a corner
like a chance –
When the poet was growing up during the 1970s, there was a popular song played on many American radio stations and juke boxes about Luckenbach, Texas, a small dust gathering of shacks, would-have-been memories and fable, but then with the Reagan ascendancy, quickly forgotten. Todd Boss later had the opportunity to see the place, whimsically on a family vacation:
At most
A ghost of a ghost of a town,
A stable of well-broken picnic tables,
A platform stage, and a dance hall
Patched with tin . . . .it wasn’t much,
But as the sign by the roadside said,
It was good enough for anybody
To be somebody to be in . . .
Because Boss’s poems are so tightly written, very seldom is there a word not plucked for sake of economy. His poems reflect this world, not outer space or fantasy, and in so doing refer to his early memories, his parents, his wife, children, and friends, as well as strangers. Any good writer savors the wells of memory, with the dialogue of years talking to each other back and forth, although some of the people may no longer be living. Here memory can be sweet and cruel at once.
One critic reviewing Boss’s first collection said that his poems bring pleasure. That they surely do, for he has always written with a wide scope – love, anger (better yet: love within anger, especially from his spouse), sudden upheaval but surviving, unceasing despair at time’s ravages, the unexpected good and not-so-good. In this, there can be rich consolation in loving one person for a long time. I refer to but will not quote from “It Isn’t All Fiddles” – for Amy, his wife – and a host of other rich quarries: “Amidwives: Two Portraits”; “A Waltz For the Lovelorn”; and “My Love For You Is Embarrassingly,” – lest you wonder, frequently the title of a Todd Boss poem is indeed the first line, punctuation included, or what amounts to that. A daring technique, but he usually makes it work.
In Pitch, there is also a sequence about a major calamity – the collapse of a freeway bridge north-south through the city of Minneapolis on an otherwise tranquil summer evening in 2007. The poet had just driven over the bridge – and his cousin has called to ask if he’s all right. Surprised, Boss replies that he’s fine, not knowing what has just transpired behind him. In part 5 of “Six Fragments For the 35 W Bridge,” the poet employs a spare sequence of jagged one-word lines – much as the North Carolina poet Lou Lipsitz did years ago in his “Skinny Poem” – to render stark effect:
Not
water
but
air’s
where
the
fallen
fall
first.
Not
landing
but
numbing
to
the
fact
that
landing
is
coming
is
the
worst
part
of
falling.
Not
losing
a
loved
one
but
calling
and
calling.
It’s worth noting that thirteen people died in this incident, with much loss of motor vehicles and other property. Boss is more than aware of his serendipitous good fortune.
Now in his mid-forties, Todd Boss surely will bring a lot more to feast on, delectable poems as affirmations in this dangerous, uncertain time. We read his poetry to see how our pulse is doing – collectively, then in each of us, among these stringently woven images.
Pitch is published in the US by WW Norton & Co and is available from Amazon in Hardcover and Kindle format.