bringing home together
I recently bought my first book of poetry, titled five or so months of home, from the author himself, while listening to a jazz band in Yaletown. The friend of a friend, I originally encountered him through his blog (see below)—and I’m glad I did. This poetry collection is wonderful.
The author, Adam Roper, published the book himself, making a whole bunch of copies at Staples—which, if anything, enhanced its appeal for me. There are little black and white drawings liberally mixed into the pamphlet-like collection—all drawn by friends of his—and on the back page he has written out, in his own scrawl, “All the profit from this book will support projects working to provide clean water in developing countries,” with the word “book” placed in as an afterthought, an arrow pointing down between the “this” and “will.” (I thought the “mistake” was on purpose, adding to an aesthetic effect which was both homely and lovely, but Roper confessed that it was otherwise: he had simply forgotten!)
Still, beyond the layout, the poetry itself is wonderful. There is an excellent balance between the whimsical, the spiritual—such as the poem “enchanted,” “I say we run somewhere for a while/and let God write this down”—and the subjectively psychological, dealing with loneliness, home, friendships and life itself.
Indeed, most of the poetry here is very subjective, dealing with personal matters close to home. This may frustrate some (I’ve heard complaints about my work in the same vein), but for me, the poetic honesty was one of the main reasons why I was able to appreciate his poems so much. I instantly identified with the words from “piecing life together”: “I’m trying to piece life back together/With friends and poems and/Appropriate books and thrift store/Cardigans,” the tone of this particular piece capturing the rhythm of multiplicity, how in our weak moments we gather things around us, some that help, some that hinder, but always one thing after another, all to make us feel fine, feel at home. The “and” following “and” draws the readers eyes around his own life, asking him to be honest about what he draws in close.
We also have some characters that recur from piece to piece. Of course, there’s the author himself; but another—for which my appreciation and enjoyment grew as the pages drew on—was Coffee. I capitalize the “C” here, because though it may not be a god in Roper’s world, it certainly is a minor spirit, a good friend, perhaps the best of friends, to be described with the most loving of tones. He pines over his “coffee from Peru” (“Driving to Seattle”), and later for “the Kenyan blend,” which was an integral part of a friendship shared in “A rainy day on Commercial”: “I have yet to find a better coffee than that night we/shared/Light roast in small quaint mugs.”
However, the most important character might be God, who is generally depicted as the great Unifier, He who collects home, collects community—the God to whom the author prays when all around him is disjointed chaos. The contrast here is often between a mournful sadness, a fear, an anxiety which has to do with empty space and lack of belonging, and that which is communal, together, beautiful. He writes in “Let Go / Miles Davis,” “grace holds on to me./And this is all I can do to/keep myself from running away.” The image is of a lonely, subjective self, lost and broken, and a loving God who picks the poet up, bringing disparate pieces of the speaker together for a warm unification, filled with hope.
I would be remiss, however, if I was not to speak about the problem that sometimes occurred within this collection. I saw only one major flaw: at times I found myself a little frustrated at a lack of form. This frustration was, of course, not universal to every poem, but in some of the longer ones, like “That nagging sense of inadequacy,” “Saving space, being home,” and “Seasons,” the lack of rhythm forced me to ignore the line breaks and read each poem as if it were prose. One of the unique beauties of poetry—and one that Roper clearly understands, given the magnificence of some of his other poems—is that the form can lead you to contemplate the words as something beyond writing on a page. However, with the poems I mentioned (and perhaps a couple others), in telling his stories—and not unenjoyable stories either—it seemed that he was unable to fit content within poetic form. With proper editing, I think these could have been vastly improved.
That said, aside from this one issue, I absolutely loved five or so months of home. Self-reflective in a way that isn’t stifling, pointing to the other, to God and to home, to friends and to coffee—this poetry is all that poetry should be. And I feel very privileged to have been one of the first to read it.
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Five or so months of home can be bought directly from Adam Roper. His e-mail is theadamroper@gmail.com, and the collection can be bought for the paltry sum of $10.
Also, check out his blog at http://adamroper.tumblr.com/.
Cheers!
