Remainder of a Thursday Afternoon by John Eivaz

(pb; 2007: poetry chapbook/anthology)

Review:

John Eivaz is one of my all-time favorite poets: his love-it-or-hate-it work reads like intuitive-flow versifying, littered with look-away-&-you-miss-it sly wordplay, truly original (sometimes startling) line-crafting, and a regular emotive potency that eludes so many poets - myself included.

Being a more literal person, I don't always know what he's specifically writing about (his natural veers into abstraction sometimes blur the layers between concrete visuals/ideas and an impressed wow!), but the words he utilizes are sharply realized, and the mood(s) of his verses are effective, pervasive.

Eivaz, a poet's poet, is what I want to be, when I become the best poet I can be - a writer whose voice works, is distinctive, even if the (occasional) poem is merely okay, not great.

All of the nineteen poems in this mainstream anthology drew me in, some more than others, e.g., "Exodus" (a great anthology exit poem):

". . . where breath thins and bodies become beautifully hollow

"where this journey is a mourn against our stars
no more our fall slows until finally we drop
in on the next world
young again the light hurts our eyes"


Other standout poems include: "sunday drive"; "the railroad follows the river"; "My Home Town" and "Sonnet" (with their auras of abstraction and romance); "implied mantis foma" (with its strong visual metaphors); "Moth"; "poem found in an imaginary sort-of flemish painting" and "the first few minutes of mahler's ninth first movement".

Remainders of a Thursday Afternoon doesn't include many of my favorite works by him - multi-genre, lust and love transcendant work that I've been reading over the course of twelve years within a mutual writing group, Erotica Readers & Writers Association - but it is a solid worth-purchasing mainstream introduction to his consistently amazing, inked visions.