reviews

Review of Paul Hostovsky’s Bending the Notes (Main Street Rag, 2009, 108 pages,
$14, http://www.mainstreetrag.com/ )

I’d like to tell you everything about Paul Hostovsky’s new book of poems, Bending
the Notes, but I can’t; it’s a large book, as books of poetry go, and covers a lot of
ground: childhood, parenting, the world of the deaf, beauty, religion, and so on. I
can, however, bend your ear towards some of the high notes.

My favorite part of the book comes early on. In fact, my favorite poem is the first
one, “Coconut.” Having seen that “Coconut” was recited by Garrison Keillor on The
Writer’s Almanac, I can’t read it without hearing it in Keillor’s distinctive, gently
husky, painstakingly careful enunciations. And yet, that sort of reading works for
this poem and for many of the poems in Bending the Notes. A number of the early
poems in particular seem written from the voice of a speaker who is careful, calm,
measured, and astutely observant of everyday miracles, such as “happiness” in
“Coconut:”

              Bear with me I
              want to tell you
              something about
              happiness
              it’s hard to get at
              but the thing is
              I wasn’t looking
              I was looking
              somewhere else
              when my son found it
              in the fruit section
              and came running
              holding it out
              in his small hands . . . .

This is the voice of the grown up you always want to be with your own children, the
grown up who is patient and gentle and able to remember the sense of awe,
appreciation and exuberance with which we experienced things as children. The
miracle of this book is that Hostovsky’s mastery of language is able to recreate
again and again not only the child’s awe at the world but also the adult’s awe at the
child. We experience this in poems like “Little League,” where the speaker talks of
his daughter marveling at the miracles of a baseball game:

              when someone hits a long foul ball
              and everyone’s eyes are on it
              as it sails out of play . . .
              the ump has dipped his hand
              into his bottomless black pocket
              and conjured up a shiny new white one
              like a brand new coin
              from behind the catcher’s ear,
              which he then gives to the catcher
              who seems to contain his surprise
              though behind his mask his eyes are surely
              as wide with wonder as hers.

We see it again in “Conversations with My Son,” where the son asks, “Would you
rather be buried or / crucified?” and, after his father’s deliberations, announces “I
think I’d rather be crucified,” as he has

              unbuckled his belt, unlocked the door
              and reappeared outside, running up the hill,
              his little backpack full of tools
              bouncing on his shoulders,
              a head on his shoulders full of questions,
              questions escaping all over.

Later poems will acknowledge the harsher, more difficult aspects of living in the
world, but in these early poems, Hostovsky embraces the child’s view and entertains
the possibilities that view engenders. The speaker of “At the Optometrist,” for
example, recaptures a moment of childhood innocence as he sits in the examination
chair:

              . . . It’s all about
which one I prefer here in the dark,
with a place to rest my chin, me and the doc
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
and so I just keep on focusing on
which one I like best, while he focuses
on making something out of it for me. I could
do this all day long. It reminds me
of childhood--what childhood ought to be:
questions concerning your favorites,
painless and gentle, someone tying your shoe
while you sit in a chair thinking of other
things. . . .

Similarly, the speaker of “Every American Child” imagines a world where childhood
appreciation of beauty is never lost to the necessary business of the adult world:

              . . . And every American child will
              be expected to learn by heart the history of the blues
              because the history of the blues is an American
              story, which some American grownups can’t be trusted
              to tell, much less sing, to their American children.

Not every poem in the book, however, features such idealism or expresses such
patience and calm. As the speakers and subjects of the poems age and the
emotional realities become more complex, a different sort of poem emerges, one
that is breathless and anxious, such as the prose poem “Deaf House” and “The
Pigeons of Lynn,” which is full of complex sentences and relative clauses. This
style of poem is repeated throughout the second half of the collection, but the
possibilities it offers for expression and the penchant the poems have for humor and
understated depth are perhaps most enjoyable in the brilliant poem, “Bicycles:”

              It’s like we’re all bycycles
              and we all have these handlebars
              and some of the handlebars and some
              of the seats are incredibly beautiful
              not to mention the way the wheels spin
              and the bells ring
              and the reflectors reflect and we can’t
              look at them and we can’t stop looking at them
              and all we really want is to get on top of them
              and ride off into the sunset but they say
              hey I’m not a bicycle okay
              I have an eternal soul that you can’t see
              because you’re so focused on my handlebars

      There is so much more offered by Hostovsky’s poetry. It is, as I’ve said, a large
book whose ultimate goal is to help us know what to do with life and love and
beauty, to teach us how “to bend the notes.” And ultimately, in learning so much
about life himself, Hostovsky reaches the point that every master does, the point
where he realizes how little he knows. That knowledge is best expressed in the
book’s final metaphor in the poem “My Statement,” ostensibly about a flute:

              . . . from the moment I lifted the thing,
              I couldn’t put it down--wherever I tried
              to stash it or ditch it, it stuck out painfully

              like some herniated part of the body
              of beauty, the inner beauty of the world, secret and silver
              and singing out from the enclosure

              of my desire for it. I couldn’t keep it. I couldn’t lose it.
              I couldn’t even play it. So I gave it back and now

              I only want to be believed.