Falling off the Bicycle Forever

Michael Rattee, Falling Off the Bicycle Forever, Adastra Press, 16 Reservation Road, Easthampton, MA 01027, ISBN 978-0-9822495-5-0, 64 pages, 16.00. Reviewed by Alan Catlin.

Of the approximately 75 new chapbooks and full-length books of poetry I read the first half of 2010, a good number of them fall into what could be called a school of writing. These books are often published by academic presses, or by small presses with editors formerly associated with universities and their writing programs. These well-schooled writers all seem to have one thing in common: polished surfaces without depth.

Movements, such as the Fluxus and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetic school, were all the rage once. An eclectic coterie of like-minded individuals established publications, published their friends and advocates, and the flame burned brightly−in a remote corner of the literary world. Did anyone outside of this tight, enclosed group take this movement seriously? You were either in or you were out, and who cared anyway? Other academics. Now we have the "polished gem school,” which falls somewhere in between the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E crowd and the purely self-referential, academic poets.

Perfect examples of this style are the recent 2010 contest winners of the Mississippi Review Book Contest. Two of the books in this series are unreadable, one of them is borderline bad, and the other could be good, if the poet followed her basic instincts and wrote from her heart−though she chooses not to. Sometimes a lot of learning is way too much. Sometimes the books are just too bad to bother with; nice to look at but who needs to read them?

Michael Rattee's latest book is particularly refreshing in this context, as he is not guilty of adhering to any school or fashion when he writes. If there is one characteristic that distinguishes his writing, it would be that he chooses to be true to himself, that he writes directly from the heart without pretense or hyperbole. These finely wrought, deceptively simple-seeming poems continually impress the reader with their maturity, a maturity not only of voice but also of vision. For Michael's subjects are timeless: the world around us and the people in it.

Weather

"And start to die together”

—Donald Hall

If you and I are not forever

then neither is this weather

sooner or later the wind

will stop the crazy clouds

the thunder quit yelling its clichés

and lightning will cease

disfiguring our world

all at once or slowly

it will change

and though one of us is gone

we will recognize the other

stepping into different weather

and be uncertain if it is

for the worse or better