Knife Fork Book, 2020
This year’s crop of Knife Fork Book releases are
elegantly produced, as usual, and their white covers with bold orange print
make them easy to spot on bookshop and library shelves. Andy Verboom’s DBL
is one of them. It’s small—a chapbook with thirteen poems—but it carries its
substance with poetic presence. Verboom’s are poems that are rich in imagery
and quick in turns of phrase, pieces that are sensory explorations of what
wordplay is all about. His work feels playful, quick witted, hopeful, and raw
at the same time.
Here is a poet who loves to work within the structures
of poetic form. In this case, it’s the sonnet, but it’s a ‘double-headed
sonnet’ that is echoed in the titles of two poems, “Fall of the Double-Headed
Dildo,” which opens the collection, and “Rise of the Double-Headed Dildo,”
which finds its place later in the chapbook. This sharp focus on form is
mirrored in the title of the collection itself, and in its careful structuring
and architecture. As he writes in “Restoration of the Royal Line,” “The genre
bends.” Using the historic foundation of the Shakespearean sonnet as a starting
place—and exploring within a set poetic form—is part of what DBL does so
beautifully and meticulously.
Travel plays a role in Verboom’s DBL, in the
way it can encourage a person to journey inside and outside of self at the same
time. In traveling, you are mindful of your experiences as they happen, while
sometimes—in daily life—you might be more apt to move through things in a more routine
and mundane way. Travel allows us to be aware of minute details in ways we maybe
wouldn’t otherwise fully see or experience them. In “Paddywagon Tours,” Verboom
conjures up the essence of a memory that is captured in cinematic tones: “In
Galway by supper, we liquefy/across a bar because, if all’s the same/at last,
we rather stiff charisma/suckle us into the necromantic.” You can imagine, as a
reader, being there in that pub, marinating in the atmosphere of it. In
“Hitchhiking the Coromandel,” the essence of a New Zealand adventure creeps
into the poem when the poet writes, “I wear humidity, the road’s fir collar.” The
sensuality of that first line smartly pulls you right smack dab into the centre
of the poem.
Really, some of the images and phrases in Andy Verboom’s
DBL will sort of make you catch your breath if you read the poems out
loud to yourself. There’s “a tealeaf given to the lukewarm bigness,” and dusk
is “a bear trap baited with a climax,” and then there’s the “ozone-braided
hair” that is “gyroscoping/with fantasy.” Too, in the final poem, “Holiday
Memory Bank,” there’s a riot of imagery and wordplay that dazzles. Here, a
boardwalk “builds over an ancient xylophone,” a foetus loiters in an
“ultrasound vestibule,” coffee “impregnates a map” where “things vanish,” and
“Pointillist sun-madness” is “squatting in eyelids.” This is the sort of thing
you really need to read out loud, to fully appreciate the careful and
meticulous rush of it all. As a keen fan of poetry, I’ll looking forward with
anticipation and curiosity as to what Verboom does next with his poetry.
