My review of Tom Snarsky’s poetry collection, RECLAIMED WATER

RECLAIMED WATER

TOM SNARSKY

Ornithopter Press

ISBN 978-942732-4-1

97 pp.

www.ornithopterpress.com

 

 

Review of Tom Snarsky’s Reclaimed Water

by Rochelle Jewel Shapiro

 

 

Reclaimed Water, Tom Snarsky’s second full-length book of poetry, dives into our deepest angst about our damaged planet and our damaged psyches, all the while buoying us with wit and erudition.

 

In epigrams, Snarsky gives homage to one of his influences—the objectivist poet, George Oppen. We can see Oppen’s influence in Snarsky’s spare prose, its simplicity, and the avoidance of formal rhyme. Instead, he makes deft associations, expanding them, making them linger in a reader’s mind as in his poem, Saddest Factory:

 

“…the old factory

where they used to make

buttons—not the kind

you push to make

something happen,

but the kind you

turn sideways to

slip through a hole

& fasten…”

 

I’m buttoning and unbuttoning in my mind the far-flung sources that Snarsky’s thirst for knowledge draws him to. Who else would think of The Roses of Heliogabalus as a title for a poem? One would have to know that Heliogabalus was a Roman emperor from 218 to 218. I merrily googled 218 Apotheke “Zum weißen Engel” to learn that it is the second part of the first track on the twenty-ninth album by Klaus Schulze, Totentab (1994), and its translation is White Angel Apothecary. Snarsky led me to read the poems of Georg Trakl and Michel Houellebecq. I learned that François Villon, a poet in the Middle Ages, stole five hundred crowns from a chapel and committed murder. And along the way, Snarsky delivers contemporary news, such as Sylvia Plath’s mother helping her send out her and Ted’s poems and the sea of rejections that rolled in.

 

Lest you think that Snarsky is a rarefied poet who only dabbles in arcane classics, check out the first two lines of Shadow Barbarian (long mix):

 

“Poets should be smart but I’ve been drinking

Rolling Rock since Mare of Easton.”

He gives good writing tips along the way such as in Stars Make Dreams and Dreams Make Stars:

         “To write poetry you need to eat

to a point where you feel kind of sick, pumpkin ice cream…”

 

He must have eaten a lot of pumpkin ice cream when he wrote, in KB Toys, “The stars are fishing for compliments.” Or when he wrote in Song of Restoration, a love poem to his wife, Kristi:

“I am looking at your face

and seeing it as

night’s greatest gift…”

Or the touching poem, Possum Heaven, composed of just one couplet that I cannot quote or I’ll give away the poem.

 

Reclaiming Water is also a passionate book about our waste of resources. But Snarsky doesn’t rail against it like a prophet or shake his finger at anyone. Instead, he takes a subtle and perhaps more devastating approach. He makes a list poem of items such as forgettable exes, tomatoes, a doctorate in veterinary medicine, and titles it with a throwaway line that has nothing to do with the list—I Don’t Know, Black Fog? You can feel the shrug of the people seeing and breathing in this thick, black, or greenish fog that contains particles of soot and the poisonous gas, sulphur dioxide. Isn’t that symbolic of how we have become inured to the violation of our planet? In another poem he calls the sea a fumigator. Fumigation is a process to kill roaches! In Confusion Matrix, by applying for a job at a water reclamation facility, Snarsky shows he isn’t shrugging off the oncoming climate disaster.:

“It was a thunderous

need to feel like I touched

something that helped people live…”

 

The waterwheel of Tom Snarsky’s unconscious mind combines all he reads and experiences, bringing it forth to readers in all its humor and sorrow and glistening.

 

—————

 

Rochelle Jewel Shapiro is the author of Miriam the Medium (Simon & Schuster). Her essays have appeared in The NYT (Lives), Newsweek, and many other magazines and anthologies. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Shapiro has published poetry in Moment, The Iowa Review, Permafrost, and Harpur Palette. Her poetry collection, Death, Please Wait, is forthcoming from Box Turtle Press. Currently, she teaches at UCLA Extension. Find her at https://rochellejshapiro.com/ and @rjshapiro