Poems of beers, music and love from long ago
With a mashed-up title taken from the names of local breweries, cover art that uses John French Sloan’s painting of New York City’s McSorley’s Old Ale House, and poems like “Beer for Breakfast,” newcomers to Kristofer Collins’ latest collection of poems might think its 60 pages overflow with Bukowskilike bacchanalia.
Instead, what’s to be found in “Roundabout Trace” is a bounty of poems that arrive full of hope and tenderness, leaning on their approachability and a speaker’s voice that lilts like a heady blend of Frank O’ Hara and James Wright.
Collins, books editor for Pittsburgh Magazine, publisher of Low Ghost Press and co-host of the legendary Hemingway’s Reading Series, continues to find his poetic groove in work that revels in friendships and makes the city respire through characterization and metaphor.
In “Blackberry Way,” he has this to say about the Lawrenceville street: “A book of poems, pint/ of beer, Zombo’s old house/ looking fine in the March/ sunshine; Dyana pours/ another clad in black, the traffic almost calling/ her name like a dozen lovers/ knees bent in the pot-holed/ rubble, eyes dipped/ in the fresh dew/ of this still new year.”
The tone, here and elsewhere, remains both celebratory and elegiac, letting the figurative language add layers to what many might find to be a nondescript city street.
Another stunner, “A Poem for Michael Wurster,” name-checks the well-known stalwart of the local poetry scene by evoking a response to Wurster’s adage that “everyone should write/ a poem about a steel mill.” But for many, like the speaker, the mills represent “the red,/ hot pump of this town gone cool and quiet/ long before my first kiss.”
In Collins’ deft hands, they become a relic of misplaced nostalgia that left many a member of Gen-X feeling less “the infernal/ roar, the colossal burn that made a dull knife/ of the air,” than the aftermath of the mills’ demise, which left “a generation of flayed men/ on unemployment, the storefronts boarded, the city/ emptied.” The line breaks and language allow this lead-off poem to fulfill expectation of what’s to come.
Collins leans hard into his exploration of jazz in works like “Miles Davis Comes to Lawrenceville,” and “Jack Teagarden Buries Louis Armstrong’s Oriental Strut, Mesa, NM, ca.1926.”
While both of those poems brim with the excitement of being alive in a world that includes such musical pleasures, his poem “Pat Martino at The Balcony,” invokes an appearance by the jazz guitarist at the long-closed Shadyside landmark to rue how love can come apart at the seams:
“I want to say/ it was raining, and there was still/ some love between us, in the way/ the vibrations of guitar strings mirrored/ our vibrating bodies, eyes falling/ on one another like strangers,/ like something seen from so great a distance/ it could be the shadow of many birds…”
The accumulation of simile is enough to leave readers slack-jawed in their effectiveness to illustrate the coming romantic loss.
With an appreciation of friends and other local poets that reminds of Beat writers rejoicing their own, “Roundabout Trace” feels like a throwback to more deliberate times. It’s also a book that pays its respects to the men and women who’ve manned the bars of drinking establishments citywide. Collins invokes memories of the Strip District’s Gene’s Last Chance Saloon, The Holiday and Bloomfield Bridge Tavern.
Suckers for the past, we Pittsburghers may be, but is it wrong for Collins’ poem, “Jimmy Tsang’s” to leave a reader thinking about sweet and sour chicken? Or to ponder, like the poet does so beautifully, “The snow falling/ out there on Centre Avenue could just go/ ahead and swallow us all,” the memories of a life lived adding up to “a small/ sign of affection before calling it a night.” Cheers to all that.