What Else Is There
by John Grey
ISBN 10930907-46-X
Poetry
98 pgs
$11
(Introduction)
A Way to Live
John Grey was born in Australia, and has lived in the United States since the late seventies. So the oft-published bio goes. He is an old friend. He is also a wonderful poet.
I have never met the man, or even seen a picture of him. He could look like Crocodile Dundee, or perhaps my accountant in New York. It doesn’t matter.
I have; however, read his poetry with great interest for more than a decade—on planes, trains, buses and boats, in the office at work and at the beach on vacation. A worthy companion. I also recently had the pleasure of publishing a broad selection of his poems in a literary journal I edit.
I say old friend because to read John’s work is to know him. And I say wonderful because in the classic sense of the word, John’s poetic vision extends beyond the myopia of contemporary culture to reveal that which we are continually confronted with yet often fail to see—the wonder inherent in the commonplace, and our responsibility to respond to it.
In “Blurb,” John addresses this directly: It’s life by process of elimination. It’s / God by default. The blurb’s instructions: You must work the work, you / must love your lover because what else is / there. In “Trick of the Light,” he writes of tracing a modest trick / back to the human dreams / of its source / where a further / leap of faith awaits. It’s an oft-visited theme in his work.
The collection you now hold in your hands consists of 65 poems written between 1992 and 2004. It is a retrospective of sorts, and represents some of John’s best poetry. And it’s very good.
John’s poetic voice is fluid and easy—more of a walk in the woods than a flash in the pulpit. He rarely, if ever, engages in linguistic pyrotechnics. His lines are conversational and deceivingly effortless, yet their economy and compaction demonstrate a rare command of form.
John is also a playwright—his plays have been produced in Los Angeles and New York—and this has clearly had a formative influence on his poetry. Almost all of his poems have a clearly defined narrative structure: not so much in the telling of an entire story, but in the presentation of an ordered sequence of events or facts. There is a causal relationship which inevitably leads to a moment of tension and release—from inaction and conflict to action and epiphany.
One of his greatest strengths lies in his ability to recognize the momentous in the momentary. He identifies—within the acts, actions and rituals of daily life—the subtext and inner meaning of minute decisions that ultimately lead to the formation of a personal philosophy. In much of John’s poetry, one can almost point to a single line—the identified moment—in which the soul of the poem emerges and (one imagines) the outpouring of words surrounding it is given birth.
In “Don’t Feed the Water Fowl,” he writes there’s an underlying horror / in every line of these park rules / at what would happen were / the jug of life to be upset. His decision: I toss my bread upon the waters anyhow, which leads him to find the hunger, the brute insistence, / of all such signs / suddenly lifted from me. His decision is the creation of individuality; his bread, the stuff of a life lived, not just passed.
In “Loving You In Winter,” John says, I learn to live / in simple spaces, / in the loss of color / everywhere but here. In a broad sense, this could be applied to all his poetry: sudden bursts of brilliant color in a world we mislead ourselves, or are misled, into seeing in 256 shades of gray. Grey is better.
The late Joseph Campbell, in his writings on mythology and religion, speaks of finding your bliss. I think Campbell would have liked John’s poetry. John’s search is, quite simply, for a way to live in a world which is not always as we would have it—but could be, if we tried a little harder.
Read, enjoy, and find a new old friend.JeanPaul Jenack
Editor, SpinDrifter
Don Pedro Island, FLMay, 2004
UNSHADED
Didn’t realize
the world’s as black and white
as this newspaper.
Until the politicians
opened their mouths,
the letter writers took to their pens,
the editorialists, columnists,
shared their sureties,
I didn’t know that
what’s not one thing
has to be its opposite.
If you’re not for,
you’re against.
If you don’t love,
you hate.
Didn’t realize
the world’s so black and white,
I can buy its truths for fifty cents,
page through them
in less than a half hour.
I tap my brow,
mutter to my brain,
don’t worry,
the newspaper’s already
done your job.
Then I think...mmm…
gray matter...
now why the hell
do they call it that?
THE MAN WHO LOST FOUR FINGERS
AT THE MACHINE
He looks warmly at me.
Two good eyes.
He grins at me.
He still has all his teeth.
He shows me a picture
of his three kids.
Penis and testicles intact then.
He walks back and forth
in front of the assembly line.
Need two legs to do that.
But I go to shake his hand
and there’s nothing there.
He apologizes
for the current state of his body.
He says the worst thing is
he can’t fondle both of his wife’s breasts
at the same time.
Must have a wife at least.
Still they didn’t cut my pay, he adds.
Have to really know what cut means
to think that’s kindness.
BLURB
This is a book that appeals to people who
don’t normally read books. It is an un-book-like
book for workers who don’t work, lovers who
don’t love. It has numbered pages, words,
an introduction, a title, even a hard cover
but these are just to mask the fact there’s
nothing there. It’s the kiss-less kiss. The
jobless job. You can pick it up. It can pick
you up. There’s an unspoken agreement between
reader and book that neither is what they
seem. It is not really a book. You are not
really a reader. True, there is something
happening here in the way nothing really happens.
It’s life by process of elimination. It’s
God by default. You must work the work, you
must love your lover because what else is
there. If there was a book written on that
subject, it would be this book.
Australian born John Grey has been a US resident since the late seventies. As a playwright, he’s had plays produced in New York and Los Angeles. As a musician, he performed his own music at various clubs in the New England area. In the early 90’s, he wrote a weekly poetry column and reviewed theater for a weekly Providence Arts newspaper. As a poet, he’s been seeing his work published since the mid-80’s with over 6000 poems in print in everything from college literary magazines to scrappy underground ‘zines to the Grateful Dead’s Relix to the classic horror publication Weird Tales. He’s been nominated many times for the Pushcart Prize and is the winner of the 1998 Rhysling Award for poetry in the science fiction/horror genres. He currently lives in Providence, RI with his wife Gale where he works as a financial systems analyst.
This is his first full-length poetry collection.