Blue Ink Runs Out on a Partly Cloudy Day
Blue Ink Runs Out on a Partly Cloudy Day
Alan Minskoff.
Limberlost Press,
1994; 34 pages; deluxe paperback, handsewn
$12.00
If we subscribe to what Gibran and Goethe have said about work and art, then we must give to Alan Minskoff's Blue Ink Runs Out on a Partly Cloudy Day nothing less than highest marks. Gibran said of work, "Work is love made visible." Goethe said of art, "Individuality of expression is the beginning and end of all art." In the physical presentation of Minskoff's chapbook, Limberlost Press has given us a work of excellence, a carefully produced, handsome publication. Love is indeed visible.There are twenty poems. Individuality of expression are their touchstone. Minskoff is an important poet. His is a singular and realistic voice in touch with life. And it can be a terrifying voice too, as in "Evelyn's Call".
The 1909 English critic, T. E. Hume, who championed the use of distinct, compact concepts would have loved Minskoff for his tight-bellied, ribby writing. The poems have instantaneous impact in their lean, nondiscursive shapes. From "The Night After," this:
John Lennon is
dead, a hard day.
At the entrance
to the Dakota
fans and cops
keep vigil.
An imagist uses figure of speech not as bauble, but as framework. Because Minskoff does just that ("The canvas stretches ten feet wide"), we may comfortably count him among Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams. Of the eighteen unrhymed yet musical couplets, "Clothesline in Jackson, Wyoming" ("A northerly/ whirls laundry/ on a string") is probably Minskoff's finest, with "Portrait in Red Ink" ("Look at the blood/ orange sun set") and "My Own Private Idaho" (" . . . dusk arrives/ gray as cooled ash") running a close second. While there exist in some of these poems enormous doses of cynicism (or is it despair?) as in lines like " . . . the volunteer/ firemen conspire to ruin/ what the blazes miss" or "Maybe she will/ marry a foreigner/ who needs to/ become a citizen," the poem "Photo 38" is utterly beautiful and heart-wrenching.
The remaining two poems are free verse--a powerful, four-page opening piece, "Random Selection", about a surgery patient's impressions, from intensive care to eventual discharge; and the touching "Things to Do on Warm Springs," about the differing dreams of wife and husband.
When the contents of a book and its packaging are of equal value, as is true of this book, we have at least a little miracle. Blue Ink Runs Out on a Partly Cloudy Day is a limited edition of 350 copies with 26 signed ($25.00 each). The wise lover of work and art will hurry to purchase one or the other.
Review by June Owens
