Review of Locklin book: Press-Telegram, Long Beach
What’s Hot: Poetry in person with LB’s Locklin
By Tim Grobaty, Columnist Posted: 02/25/2009
POCKET OF POEMS: For some reason, we’ve taken quite a liking to “The Plot of Il Trovatore,” the probably 80-somethingth book of poems we’ve received from and by Long Beach’s finest poet, Gerald Locklin.
We tote it around with us, reading a piece from time to time while waiting for a vet or a dentist, or a bus to show up or for our daughter to emerge from the schoolyard.
Perhaps because it’s pocket-sized, or maybe we just thoroughly enjoy Henry Denander’s watercolor of, we’re guessing, Verdi’s Manrico on the cover – it’s likely those two things and the obvious fact that the poems in the slim but beautifully constructed collection are among Locklin’s best – and coming here so long after the poet’s slightly imaginary friend’s rompings through the bar-life and debauchery of Long Beach in the 1970s have long since crashed into near-death and the life ever-after.
The range is huge. At one end, there’s the wry Locklin humor in the self-deprecation – or the spousal deprecation – of “Toad’s Medic-Alert Bracelet,” in which the aging alter ego’s wife offers to order it for her Toad, an act for which he is grateful, until it arrives bearing the inscription:
low i.q.
advanced hypochondria
and chronic intolerance of household chores.
And then there are the works inspired by Locklin’s lifelong love of the fine arts and the jazz form of music – a brace of indulgences he uses in much of his work now, in some ways to offset some of Advertisement the things in which he or his muse no longer indulge, though those things inevitably sneak in.
We are still happiest when he is a bit melancholy, as he is in “Good People,” which resonates a bit uncomfortably with our own experiences, and which we don’t even feel good about excerpting here – you’ll just have to somehow acquire your own copy, which you can through Kamini Press (www.kaminipress.com) for $6.
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