Luck by Liz Ahl

Luck

by Liz Ahl

Pecan Grove Press, 2010

48 pages, $8.00

Reviewed by Mary Ellen Geer

Some chapbooks consist of a series of closely related poems, with a common subject or theme or form, or a narrative arc that connects all the poems--and in many ways the chapbook is ideally suited to such an arrangement, with its relatively short length of 25 poems or so. But I also like chapbooks with a wide variety of settings and subjects, where each poem comes as a surprise, where the reader finds herself in unexpected places and new situations. Liz Ahl’s Luck belongs in this second category. Although there are several themes that recur in the poems like leitmotifs--luck in games and the allure of winning, listening to music in bars, looking at the stars and planets, living in the cold north--this collection often surprises by taking us into new territory. The settings in these 24 poems include a craps table in a casino. a road trip at night in the midwest, a lawn with a statue of the Virgin Mary, a carnival midway, a skateboarder in a sculpture garden, a college campus, ice shacks on Lake Menomon, a typesetting workroom, pubs and bars where music is being played. One of Ahl’s strengths as a poet is the ability to draw the reader into these scenes, to let you not just see them but feel and hear them. By the end of her poem called “Setting Type,” for example, you can feel the weight of those blocks of lead type: “My fingertips and thumbs are smudged with meaning. / I’m not looking for the story, but feeling instead / the sheer heft of sentences . . .  the literal weight of them / in the galley tray, the thing they say to my fingers / and to my forearms and the pits of my elbows.”

Many of the poems are written in couplets and tercets, which work well with the poems’ subjects, and there are two nicely done villanelles (never an easy form to pull off), again well suited to their subjects--the yearning for food, and luck in gambling. Later in the book there are several poems where Ahl breaks away from the regular stanzas and has poems with long lines and varying stanza lengths, and these are among the liveliest and most interesting poems in the book. One that I especially like is “Who Do You Drive For?”, a poem in which the speaker, driving on a long trip through the midwest at night, stops at a service area and is asked this question by a trucker, who thinks that anyone driving alone this late at night must be a trucker, like him. The speaker spends the rest of the trip “inventing answers” to this question: she is driving for her friend in Chicago; she is driving for herself; she is driving for the speed; and she is driving

            . . . for Walt Whitman, who, even now,
            hangs his head out my passenger side window,
            mouth open, nose into the wind, eager
            for experience like a dog, my friend
            on this long journey to a place we’ve never been.
            We’re hauling secret, unspeakable freight
            and we name as we go like Adam and Eve did
            . . . . .
            and we command new syllables to leap off
            our tongues in soulful, barbaric yawps.

How can you not like a poem in which Walt, with his “barbaric yawps” from “Leaves of Grass,” appears with such vividness in the passenger seat?

Another strong poem is the one that ends the book, “Rain Dances,” set in a bar in Nebraska where a band is playing loud, thumping music as a storm hits outside:

            The storm that’s been waiting all day to hatch
            from the lowdown sky comes tumbling out as we sway
            to the take-no-prisoners blues. Lightning
            does its neon sign routine outside the front windows--
            but the only thunder we feel is thumping from the stacks
            and the sax pours out brass tornado siren wails.

By the end of the poem you feel you’re in that bar, dancing along with them:

            Hot as hell, we shake it on out, bumping
            into strangers, inventing dances
            like the hey-baby-what’s-your-sign,
            the exploding-thunderhead-lambada,
            the talk-to-the-hand-cause-the girl-ain’t-listenin’.
            . . . . .
            Sometime during the second break,
            a tornado blows through Beatrice,
            and later, after midnight, after the birth of a third set
            of scorching guitar licks and girl-don’t-do-me-wrong-no-more
            blues, we trickle our snare drum shuffleout into the rain-
            soaked streets, heads pounding . . .

It was interesting to read in Ahl’s bio that she has collaborated with musicians and dancers, and her work has been set to original music, combined with dance choreography, and riffed to improvisational jazz.

Another poem about performing music, “Girls with Guitars,” is more introspective--we’re again in a pub where music is being played, again there’s a lightning storm outside, but this time the music is quieter, a singer-songwriter with a guitar, and the speaker conveys vividly how in a setting like this you can feel lonely and not lonely at the same time:

            I let myself feel lonely, but warm
            with coffee and bourbon and the murmur
            of the crowd, all the people I don’t know
            surrounding me like a family.

There’s a lot to like in this chapbook, and by the end I feel that I’ve been a witness to, and sometimes a participant in, many different scenes and places, accompanied by the vivid language and images of this poet.