Book Review

Do you occasionally fold an invoice into the shape of a futuristic spacecraft, or twist paper clips into Giacometti style figures? Maybe, as a further distraction from work, you might sing along to the office microwave, as the speaker does in Ariel Yelen’s fine poem “Revolution,” adding a minor third, dropping to the lower fifth and finishing in unison with the machine’s concluding note. If the latter, it seems that “Music under most circumstances / Will take desperate / Measures to come back into your life.”

Music, art, poetry—the point is that claustrophobia and boredom can breed memory and desire just as effectively as spring rain, and that confinement in the workplace day after day, rather than being a deadening experience, can be a spur to creativity. It is one of many ideas explored in this pleasing first collection where the subject of work generally interests the author: its influences and opportunities, its challenges, the inescapable specter of its very presence in our lives. It is a big subject, but dealt with skillfully in nicely observed detail, crafted philosophical asides, and entertaining digressions. It’s a concept that works, and works well.

The job you sit down to each morning can energize. It can give you power, autonomy, and identity. It can also provide temporary refuge from yourself; the self that, unlike the working day, can at times be disturbingly unstructured. An interesting take on this is provided in the title poem where the narrator, taking on more and more jobs, finally decides to give up everything but work—the friends, the partner, the therapist—resulting in the moment when “. . . That perfectly abstract / yet persistent weight on my body and psyche at last / let up . . .”. That release, of course, coming at the cost of those annoying little interruptions that make us so imperfectly human.

I was intrigued by a piece entitled “This poem says yes” which describes a poem being constructed “In plain speech, nothing frivolous or flowery” from the mundane chat the poet is having with a co-worker, while at the same time noting the screensaver:

. . . how it displays the unlikely story

Of a peaceful transition

From pristine glacial lake to arid red desert

Meet you at Rainbow Falafel in thirty

It’s a delightful little sketch (that last line is a gem) depicting in a few well-chosen words the conflict between our inner and our outwardly projected selves. Who’s to say, by the way, the other person isn’t thinking exactly the same?

Pretty much all the poems here offer thoughtful observation and serious consideration in the same throwaway manner; employing scraps of conversation, seemingly banal detail and office jargon to convey the good and the bad of the workplace, along with glimpses of a landscape the other side of the billboard. There’s a lovely line, if lovely’s the word, in the poem “All morning, tax evasion,” which neatly sums up the sort of petty frustration encountered when, after a long day, you set off for home. The speaker, in a dank subway station where the trash overflows and the train never comes, observes dryly that “Utopia’s attainable but pressing / On truth where it’s tender.” As you read, you can imagine the forlorn features, and almost feel the gritty draught around your legs. And I was very much taken with the preceding poem—a prayer, which opens with the lines: “May I meet / the dean’s corporate tactics / with the powerful hush / of a weeping / willow.” Juxtaposing the bloodless language of bureaucracy and commerce with touches of poetic fancy is what Yelen does. It’s a formula which effectively draws the reader in, inviting understanding, and perhaps prompting speculation about what we are actually doing every day.

Section two of this three-part collection is a real tour de force; a confident and informed piece put together in nicely controlled language propelled by knowing humor and sharp observation. Consisting of a compendium of fifteen untitled poems (or one poem of fifteen stanzas?) it deals with the domestic, the practical and more intimate components that litter the hours between waking and clocking out. The example I offer below can almost be interpreted as representing the very essence of Yelen’s idea behind I Was Working, in twelve short lines—

I consider the

Bed made when I have

Hidden the mattress

Now it is summer

I bring twenty books

With me to my desk

Open only one

Eat a leftover

Salami sandwich

While talking on phone

After I tell you

Something, I tell you

I meant what I said

—where there is not a single word that hasn’t earned its place. Twelve lines that, to me, demonstrate an almost unthinking resistance to the soft tyranny of the printer, the laptop, the pressure to conform. There is within them the feeling of a quiet insistence on holding on to oneself, and of looking over and beyond.

I’ll close with the following observation dropped almost nonchalantly into a ragbag of a poem titled, enigmatically, “The problem with beauty is that it convinces me of achievement.”

Life really does make people into poets

Kind of pervy not to be a poet or artist if you think about it

and who’s to disagree? It’s in our nature to seek answers, to corral our formless longings, our what ifs, our nagging doubts, and give them due consideration, to make something of them. Ariel Yelen has done just that in a series of poems both highly original and shamelessly entertaining. There’s an informed maturity here, combined with a little playfulness and a good ear, which makes for a quite remarkable debut.