When I read Pablo Neruda, especially his love poems, I’m swept up by his beautiful imagistic language, his personifications, his metaphors, and his musicality. I feel the same when reading Jonathan Koven.
Koven’s rookie chapbook Palm Lines is filled with many beautiful lines that force the reader to stop and take a breath, such as this paean to love from “WE WON’T SHARE THE WISH WE MAKE”:
I’m drunk but not enough
to confess
your open mouth is a comet
I often wish upon
And this meditative line from “THE STACKS”: “To receive both shades of the sky, to love / what I’ll never understand; to be cradled / by hands I can’t see, to confess weakness.”
And here, the ecstasy of the search, from “EXHALATIONS”:
I’ll lighthouse
for something surfing
heaven’s rip and find
something other
than rage.
I admire a poet’s verbal dexterity and Koven shows a lot of skill in choosing just the right words. In the last example above, notice how he uses the word “lighthouse” as a verb. He employs this technique a few times, and he will also utilize to good effect words that are seldom used as verbs. Here are a few examples:
“ Over the man-made world, / a sparrow talons away with my heart / into blue reverb” (from “THE SHOT THAT ECHOES FOREVER”)
“Window glass abstracts the shape of self into more people.” (“ELEGY FOR THE COMPLETE SOUL”).
“My arms raft all / of you (pain, hope, wisdom), and we float / to the words’ truest meaning; or how we feel / truest love, and crest over the shortfall of language.” (“TO HOLD EVERY FLYING AND FALLING AT ONCE”). Notice the pun in “crest over the shortfall of language.” It’s brilliant!
Also, the layout of the text of the beautiful and sensual “TO HOLD EVERY FLYING AND FALLING AT ONCE” suggests a rhythmic breathing, a rising and falling of the ocean’s waves, which match the poet’s message of love, one he seems to be unable to clearly define or contain:
I have told you that I love you, though its
meaning severs far beyond the words,
as rapids might burst open tightest
banks; less like a leak and more
like tide, love’s endless body
overflows, engulfing
all our days, free
and finally
unwritten.
Palm Lines consists of 22 poems and is divided into three sections: “Life Lines” (in palmistry, this represents one’s journey), “Heart Lines” (one’s relationships), and “Head Lines” (one’s knowledge and mentality). Although one doesn’t necessarily feel a hard distinction between poems in each section, it’s not any fault of the poet’s. His work, no matter the topic—family, friends, love, insecurity, gratitude—digs deep into his emotional wellspring to find the “concord of terror and beauty,” to “feel the ground tremor across flesh,” to discover that which is “too deep to revisit” (“THE SHOT THAT ECHOES FOREVER”).
Koven’s poems are steeped in astronomical and earthly imagery: the moon, sun, stars, sky, oceans, trees, wind, family, birds, and insects. They are also grounded by familiar scenes and objects such as concrete cracks, riverbanks, an ankle tattoo, wheat fields, oaks and sycamores, and streetlamps.
Koven’s poetic voice has a dreamlike quality to it. It’s almost as if he’s writing from underwater; there’s a hazy transformative aspect, a vague timeless quality, a romantic longing for surrender, but Koven also has a keen eye for concrete details as well. You can sense the young poet’s sincerity (he’s in his 20s). He’s not jaded, but he perceives a kind of emotional imbalance in the world. His voice is soft and hard and wild and smooth and always inviting.
The poem “DROWNED IN THE EYE OF THE EQUINOX,” for example, seems to use the change of seasons as an extended metaphor for sadness or depression. But the poet does not bludgeon us with dark scenes of foreboding. Rather he lightly suggests something is amiss.
The moon opens. My eyes rotate
to reproach my insides.
The pith’s fumes sing, Reduce me,
with their sour breaths.
Given this introduction, when the narrator says, in the second stanza, “More shadow has spilled over / from dawn. Cold rain covers / everything until tomorrow”, we are inclined to believe he is referring to something more personal.
As ominous as the third and last stanza seems to be, there is also a ray of hope in the final line, only because a “seed” holds promise of new beginnings:
The season dies a rabid animal,
hiccupping, seizing, Remember me,
I cannot be careful tonight,
my fire extinguished:
a crying child,
a seed.
A companion poem to the one above might be “BRAMBLES AND BRAMBLES.” In this piece, the poet tells us that when he’s lonely, “I go to verdantly green spaces.” He holds back sharing these moods with his partner to his own detriment. “Each passing year, I think / there’s another world waiting, but it’s here.” Finally, he says to her: “You love the waters whooshing / beneath, so I promise / I’ll listen.”
In the poem “THE CACOPHONY,” we find Koven at his best in terms of phrasing, sentiment, and metaphor. This is a poem asking us to be still and listen to that which we don’t often hear. But Koven asks us in his unique poetic voice:
With your ears,
have you ever sanded down the street’s speech,
to focus
on the freakish orchestra, a dancing & complex
inner vacancy,
harmonizing with what you once heard as hush?
I love his use of the phrases “sanded down” and “street’s speech” and “once heard as hush.” The rest of the poem is as impressive, and I would love to quote it in its entirety, but I won’t (you’ll have to buy the book).
Based on the fact that certain names in the dedication show up in poems, we can assume that Koven is the narrator of many, if not all, of the poems. Many pieces lean toward confessional but are not maudlin. And many are romantic, reminding the reader of Charles Baudelaire or Percy Bysshe Shelley or Walt Whitman.
Like a true romantic, Koven wants to scream from joy or burst at the seams in many poems. Here is a poet so enraptured by his surroundings, be they people or nature, that he simply can’t contain himself. Take this example from “THE STACKS”:
I wanted to scream at them, I don’t know what.
Wordless, humongous. This beauty, everything
I’ve ever cared about—eternally, rhythmically,
eventually disproportionately.
Here, in “THE CACOPHONY,” Koven is talking about the stillness he hears after tuning his ears to it: “It is too loud, / the conversation both terrifying & beautiful.”
In “THE SKY RINSES MY HANDS,” the poet writes about driving with his brother in the dark: “and I might scream my laughter—and you might scream to keep from laughing.”
And in “PRECIPICE,” the closing poem, Koven exclaims: “I’m finding myself, finding myself dying. I promise to feel everything before I go.”
I’ll end with a mention of two poems. “EIGHTEEN” is a marvelous look at that awkward age where we’re adults yet still adolescents (Alice Cooper has got nothing on Koven!). Like most poems in this collection, “EIGHTEEN” deserves to be read more than once. It’s filled with many memorable lines, such as: “Try hard to remember to /…/ inject caffeine from night vespers / your solitude a syringe” and “Don’t forget to stay near / where fantasy is easy /…/ and stare together into the fuel / of all your wretched secrets”.
The second poem, and my favorite in the collection, is titled “PHOTOGRAPH OF VISIBLE LIGHT.” It’s a short poem and I don’t think I can do it justice by quoting a line or two. Suffice it to say, it is a beautiful, poignant poem, whose simplicity is deceiving. Its quiet sadness is heart wrenching and the ending, a punch to the gut. But the best part, the most brilliant part, is the title. When I view the title alongside the poem, I envision a three-dimensional hologram that contains infinite possibilities, but none of them directly connecting the title to the poem. It’s an implicit connecting. I also think that Koven is throwing us off the trail, that what he really has done is aimed an X-ray beam at this “small family.”
One last note. Original paintings by Tyler Lentini appear alongside the section breaks, as well as on the cover. Koven viewed Lentini’s body of work and chose the pieces he felt best fit the aesthetic and conceptual direction of the book. These are beautiful, colorful abstract works that nicely complement the poetry. Also, the editor for this Chapbook Series II was Sean Hanrahan, whose reviews you can read on the Mad Poets Society Blog.
Koven, a Long Island native, is a poet (and writer of poetic fiction) who we should keep our eyes on. His poems are accessible yet multilayered. His language is simple but not simplistic. He questions the world but expresses gratitude for the way it is. He employs vivid imagery and often leaves the reader with a haunting, yearning feeling, which one doesn’t necessarily want to immediately relieve, but can be satiated later by another reading of this wonderful collection. I look forward to following the career of this poet as he leans into maturity and as his subject matter reflects the tensions inherent with living a purposeful life.
