Chiwan Choi's 'abductions' & Stephen Murray's 'On Corkscrew Hill'

It was an impulse buy while killing time one afternoon in Skylight Books in Los Angeles; a cover that was sexy and sleek and naively conned me into buying it. It was written by a man who, at that point in time, was to me the Keyser Soze of the LA poetry scene. I knew he was out there somewhere and had heard good things, but he had so far evaded my handshake. I knew, as I ordered a coffee in the diner up the street and opened the first poem, he was probably in a bar downtown, writing, as a writer bloody well should. I also knew, after the third time I had read the fires across and after the third refill of piss-weak coffee that this collection was going to jeopardize my health were I to attempt it in one sitting. It is now, some months later, that I can happily sit back and affirm that I was not conned at all.

            Chiwan Choi’s Abductions (Writ Large Press) is the work of a man who has come a long way to claim downtown LA as his own.  While the book offers readers snapshots of his journey through poems such as dulce de leche and stirring flashbacks in the moment it begins, for me, these pages are the cogs that keep LA turning – either that, or LA is the cog that keep these pages turning. It’s gritty and not at all afraid to put the reader on the corner of 7th and Broadway, or in the bedroom with the quarrelling couple, or in the emergency room with a poem such as her journey which leaves you winded.
“it began with her/ as the war broke out in korea,/ the abductions.”
I’ve always been suspicious of poetry collections that are close to the bone, over personal; as if the writer is using the one move he or she knows to win the contest by repeating it. Choi, however, keeps it poetry. As Ezra Pound put it: “Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.” And so we come to the poem feet bare. For me, this is the best poem in the book, tying many other poems together and bringing it all back to brilliant poetry:

Last night
at 2am,
i opened my eyes
when i searched for her once more
on the wrong side
of myself –
darkness can’t be blamed
for the wanting of wrong directions. 

There are poems in this collection the shake you, others that sing. Other too that make you want to get up early, walk the streets with the writer looking up at the sky with {my} eyes barely open, sending messages into outer space. This particular abduction is a worthwhile one; one you will need to read again and again. 

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Whereas many fans of Stephen Murray’s earlier work might have been expecting On Corkscrew Hill (Salmon Poetry) to pick up in the same darkly confessional tone where his debut collection House of Bees left off, Murray drops to the table a whole new hand of cards. Firmly rooted in its west of Ireland canvas, this his second collection wastes no time in painting portrait after portrait of place. The Burren, Bundoran, Galway, Templemore, Stradbally and Mountshannon are just some of the settings that propel the reader through both the political and social landscape of modern Ireland. The collection begins softly – as if the first two poems are preludes as to what will happen; the first a sliver of natural imagery and personification, the second a dig as if to say “I’m only just getting started.” By the time the third poem At Pollathomais, County Mayo comes along, we know what we’re in for:

“from bog to brine to pastured glebe backed by Bertie’s boys in blue/ to play Punch and Judy with fortunes of hardworking folk,/ fishermen and their weathered wives...”
As we turn through the corridors of this book, we find a poet in despair at the crumbling world he inhabits, yet surrender as he picks us back up while applauding those he respects – the hallelujahs of mankind,/ statuesque upon the elbows of Atlas. (from Surf Talk in Budoran.

But Murray has picked his fight, and is soon back forcing to the ropes the health care system, the national broadcaster, and ultimately the developers, who, in the title poem of the collection, are asked to accept their own misdeeds. This (On Corkscrew Hill) is a poem worthy of its own review.

What Murray can do, unlike many, is make a sentence pounding with assonance and alliteration, yet not sacrificing content and maturity, seem effortless. Bird Man Spawns brings us back to what I said at the beginning. This collection is a whole new hand of cards 
–
“The devil’s own pack , half jokers and jacks,/ A straight card flush, part magic trick stroke truth,/ Strung up by the neck in the sheds of my youth.”
While it might be fair to assume that Murray has found his writing style, his voice; it’s his larger-than-most horizon of subject matters that will keep us keenly anticipating what comes next.

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