Book Review

Talk Poetry
by Mairéad Byrne
Miami University Press, 2007, $10.00
www.orgs.muohio.edu/mupress/details/byrne_talkpoetry.html.
ISBN: 1881163490

Hey, you know what's interesting? Everything. Not just sex, like I thought, and having lots of money, but everything is interesting if you give it the right thrust. Even just, like, where you park your car can be a compelling topic—provided you have smarts that soar like Mairéad Byrne's:

...Yesterday I went to the Athenaeum which is a small private library in Providence. I was going to park near the park & walk but then I said No, why don’t I try the Athenaeum parking lot. The Athenaeum parking lot is somewhere I’ve been—walking....

(from "Parking"—and what'd I say? Smart.)

I was introduced to Mairéad Byrne through her blog, Heaven. I don't know how I stumbled upon it, considering the clog of far flashier-but-less worthwhile pages. But while scanning through it just now—starting at its inception in Spring 2003 until I finally found the poem I was looking for, posted on January 22, 2006—I was excited to see early versions of the poems collected in her magnificent Talk Poetry. The poem I was looking for, which isn't included in the volume (published by Miami University Press), was a watershed for me; I recommend "Short Movie" to anyone who has seen the 2005 thriller "Red Eye," which I recognize is a fittingly bizarre recommendation to make in a critical review.

But marginal movies come up in Talk Poetry, too:

...Another funny bit was when Sandra Bullock's fiancé was sitting at a desk in the other room behind a giant laptop. I said Whoa look at the size of his laptop. Then my daughter said It’s not a laptop. It’s a desk-top. That laugh became a great dark sack of it’s own too...

(from "We Had A Laugh")

Ultimately, I doubt Mairéad Byrne is interested in the poetic virtue of Hollywood movies except for the ways she can contort them for her purposes. The trick, for her, is in the timing. And the trick too is in her language sensibility; the confidence she has in a pedestrian lexicon and bad grammar electrifies everything, even the most static topic. Certainly there are traces of Alan Dugan in this sensibility, but Byrne draws his influence out to a different extreme, making what’s funny more transparent. Rethink beauty with these lines from Talk Poetry:

"When a person is throwing up you cannot help in the throw-up operation."

"America is just the greatest man."

"I had to watch the movie very fast because I was going out."

"I had a bit of time Sunday so I ate all my breakfasts for the week."

"My mother sits inside me like a frog."

And the best trick of all comes when she uses her droll syntax to package complex emotionality. "That laugh became a great dark sack" is a wonderfully imagistic way to get at, or around, sadness. There is real pathos in these poems, as is required of good comedy. Byrne's poems highlight the symbiosis of comedy and tragedy—the hilarity lends credibility to the sadness. I fell off my bike as a boy, racked my genitals on the crossbar, and everyone laughed and apologized and laughed some more.

Mairéad Byrne has done more for prose poems than anyone since Russell Edson. I think she's done more for divorcees than Russell Edson ever did, too, and also for house chores and breakfast. Talk Poetry, I hope, will give direction to poetry in general, forever, amen. I'd love to see a new crop of poets emulating her all the time as has been done for Charles Bukowski and Jackson Mac Lowe. Just as she has constructed towers on Alan Dugan's foundation, there is a world tucked into her acuity that a movement will unfold to unsuspected heights. —Adam Robinson