HOUSECAT KUNG FU by GEOFFREY GATZA

RUTH LEPSON Reviews

Housecat Kung Fu by Geoffrey Gatza
(Meritage Press, St. Helena & San Francisco, 2009)

Geoffrey Gatza has moments of Leslie Scalapinoism:

Consumed, I began cleaning; as a portrait of moments flicking out a drifting life, a lake, an edited reality

of sweet humor:

a hazelnut is a miserable/ nut to quarrel with...a man’s heart devises his dance/and earth charms away his days

of visual poetry:

There are two sides to every tablecloth
is a line that gets paler as we see the other side of the tablecloth

of personification that moves compelling sounds through emotion:

look at me alive
                  
frozen paths cut
                  
lonely blankets of snow

                  
moments live for days

crazy flights of imagination:

so I took off my nose and unzipped
my skin and folded it neatly by the reflecting
pond so no one would think those awful things
people think about people who go leaving
their skin any which way

his own set of myths, for instance, how the jellyfish was beaten into a quivering lump

and endless sweetness and sympathy:

maddened moments of trees in terrible pain, Cars rusting on their underbelly

so read his book HOUSECAT KUNG FU, whether you are an adult or a child, because once you start you will want to continue.

*****

Ruth Lepson is poet-in-res at New England Conservatory of Music. Her books are Dreaming in Color, Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology (ed.), Morphology, a collaboration with artist Rusty Crump of his & her pix & her prose poems, and, forthcoming from blazeVOX.org, I Went Looking for You. She has been performing with jazz musicians Noah Preminger & Eric Lane in low road, & the group has a CD forthcoming.