Malawi RPCV Andrew H. Oerke's book of poems entitled "Symphony Number One and Selected Poems" is a wonderful set of poems about humanity's existential struggle
SYMPHONY NUMBER ONE AND SELECTED POEMS, by Andrew Oerke, published by Mellen University Press, Reviewed by Thomas Jones.
Andrew H. Oerke's book of poems entitled "Symphony Number One and Selected Poems" is a wonderful set of poems about humanity's existential struggle. This is heavy reading.
Each poem is finely crafted, often falling into iambic pentameter or tetrameter and seldom rhyming but using alliteration. The imagery is striking if not shocking. Take, for example, the poem "Return from the Sun," the first three lines read:
In the hexahedron of the sun's eye,
The golden honeycomb gilded with mirrors,
My silhouette stalagmite of a cat's eye…
The honey is a distillate of air "scented with buckwheat." How I can just now smell that buckwheat in the sunny field! I can just imagine what it must be like to have visited the sun and returned all golden and brassy.
As the reader might guess, his poems are also surreal, however, they are not so incomprehensible as to be inaccessible or unintelligible to most readers of poetry.
The best poems in the book are probably "Hippo's Head," "Hawk on the Roadside," "Return from the Sun" and "The Sun," which I picked because of their virtuosity and originality. In Oerke's work I hear echoes of Wallace Stevens and seventeenth century poets in terms of vocabulary and style. The poem called "Harvest" has that seventeenth century feel that is found in a poet like Donne or Herrick.
So, I suppose if one were to label Oerke's work, one might call it neo-Baroque as the structure of the ideas and the poems themselves could buttress the sides of any cathedral, whether real or imaginative. These poems are truly metaphysical in an age when metaphysics is out of fashion.
The only complaint I have about the book is its capacious references or allusions at the end of the book.
Despite this, I recommend the book for any serious reader of poetry.
