Reviewed by G. C. Waldrep
To read much George Kalamaras at one sitting is to grow progressively more aware of a certain circle or cycle of reference points—images, words—that form, at the confluence of Surrealism and the yogic meditative traditions that together constitute the wellspring of his work, a sort of eccentric, vivid kabbala.
At the lower registers lie nodes of lice and carp, silk and blood, the owl, and the human groin. In the middling scaffolding reside ears and bees, the moon, the color green, the tongue, the human torso (by way of "chest" and "breast"), eggs and eels and salt and seed. Cascading over everything, hair: sometimes shaved, sometimes growing, sometimes braided; sometimes the speaker's, sometimes another's. At the very top, crowning Kalamaras's vision of the world, glitter spine and vowel and sparrow.
Kalamaras works conscientiously in both the traditions he has chosen to inherit. His newest book, Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair—beautifully produced by Gian Lombardo's Quale Press—claims the Surrealist painter Paul Delvaux (whose 1937 painting The Call of the Night appears on the book's cover) is its tutelary muse; Max Ernst also appears, briefly if memorably, as a sort of doting uncle. The book's compositional strategies hew close to Surrealist practice, but the book's philosophical frame of reference comes from various Eastern spiritual traditions; Kalamaras dedicates the volume, in part, to "the beloved Yogis of India." The result is a synthetic discourse that moves easily back and forth between Western modes of juxtaposition and surprise and Eastern postures of phenomenological concern.
Kalamaras's previous book, Borders My Bent Toward, prosecuted his particular (and particularly erotic) vision primarily through traditional free verse lines and stanzas. The major exception to this rule was the playfully exuberant series of epistolary prose poems he called "Births Incurred" (Kalamaras's half of a long-standing correspondence with Eric Baus; the other half appears in print in Baus's The To Sound). Nearly all of the poems in Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair are prose poems, but the shift is more than a formal one.
For starters, the poems in Java Sparrows seem more relaxed than their predecessors. In Borders Kalamaras displayed an insistent emotional earnestness that crosscut, and sometimes undercut, the affective power of Surrealist play. In Java Sparrows that earnestness has receded; the result is often a less coercive experience for the reader, though also at times a less exigent one. It's as if Kalamaras had channeled Russell Edson by way of his own erotic fever dream and a renewed acquaintance with Breton. Here are three prose stanzas from "A History of Sleep":
Animal skins from the time of Eden. Hunters with boils, appearing from Emmaus, believing in inverted stars. Eating locusts. A nipping in your half-sleep when you turn over the day's plague as hair crowding the pillow.
You found the earthworm and left the clods moiling in the moonlight. What could not be put into love? Pried into an earwig? What cracked like a word broken across the black bread?
We were inmates of the dark kitchen. Given crusts. Told never to believe a lay person or a monk. The window, the size of those in Flemish paintings. The cup of boiled milk had a skin of cinnamon, was smaller and larger than your only mother.
Most of the poems in Java Sparrows rely more on narrative than "A History of Sleep," which conveys Kalamaras's associational poetics in condensed form. Kalamaras's Eros is less an Eros of encounter than an Eros of condition: everything has sensual valence, starting with sound and proceeding through the human body to language and other furnitures of daily life.
What sets Java Sparrows apart from other contemporary Surrealist poetries, and from Kalamaras's earlier books, is a sense of community that not only informs his process but also infuses the work. Rarely have I read a book of poems so affectionately aware of its own primary audience. Two of the longer poems in Java Sparrows are addressed to poet John Bradley; others appear to be later entries in his correspondence with Baus. The flip side of human community, of course, is loss, and Java Sparrows contains more than its share of elegies. Maybe it's this sense of the fragility of community that makes Java Sparrows read more soberly than Borders My Bent Toward. There were moments when I longed for the manic wordplay of "Births Incurred," but they were matched by the moments in which I, reading from outside the charmed circle, nevertheless felt the pathos that lies at the heart of Kalamaras's project, the sweetness of each inevitable goodbye.
For me, the most powerful poem in Java Sparrows is the longest poem, "Wang Wei Board Game." Positioned as the second of four sections in the book, "Wang Wei Board Game" invents itself through nine pages of instructions for prospective players. The instructions alternate between moments of pathos, humor, technical language, wry humor, and high camp. The poem's appropriation of the ancient Chinese poets is indiscriminating, irreverent, and thorough. Here is the stanza describing the gamepieces:
Select board token as your principal participant 'identity.' Choose among the following, one for each player: wandering monk, Chinese timber wolf, panda chewing bamboo, lute, Mongolian pony, emperor's fingernail (pointed, curved token), Tu Fu's ragged overcoat (token with holes), amorous palace peacock, courtesan, Yangtze ferry boat (without ferryman), River Han ferry boat (with ferryman), panda without bamboo (sad-looking token), full moonlight (elongated, translucent piece), Tartar warrior, blood pheasant (red-tipped winged token), apricot grove moth, river wave Li Po drowned in (token marked luminous with dissolving star), Subprefect Chang (government official token), court poet, yarrow stalk, bamboo rain forest (large, slightly damp token), and conscription officer.
The poem, of course, is a game, not unlike the game it describes. Who wouldn't want to play? As the poem progresses, however, it becomes clear that we are all already playing. "Place poem on depiction of one stream or the other, and sprinkle water," the instructions at one point read, "...until brush stroke of calligraphy dissolves, joining the 'world of me' with the world of the eternal river of either life or death." "Is there a way out of one's soul?" Kalamaras asked in his previous book. In Java Sparrows, the soul finds its way back in.
Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair
By GEORGE KALAMARAS.
Quale Press. 2004. $14
Originally published on Octopus Magazine. Reproduced here with permission.
