A Daily Glance
Steve Davenport's Uncontainable Noise is a book settled in the prairie and stretching westward. It collects things at it moves--whisky, divorce, guns, Cadillacs, sonnets. It's like a combination of a country song and contemporary poetry. For example:
Say you're drunk and knee deep in theories of desire,
stereo cranked, and you know better than bourbon
what the thumping means, the violence under your skin.
A large part of the book consists of sonnets. In fact, the book seems to be a thinking through of the sonnet with various content. Of the form, he says:
Understand the fixed syllable count, twelve per line,
and the fourteen lines plus the fifteenth, the title,
not as shrine, but as a spell or a fist squeezing
the center of nothing gathering.
At heart, the book seems both like a playful rant on the things that are at the core of the Midwest and, at the same time, a discussion of American poetry.
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