David McAleavey
Huge Haiku
ISBN 0-925904-46-5
$20

Reviews

Huge Haiku indeed. Incredibly obsessive,
exceptionally detailed haiku might be a more exact description.
Imagine 80 Flowers exfoliating over a far greater
terrain, growing wild in fact with a sense of its own range. Yet not
without self-knowledge. "Blunt architecture" is both the first title
and first phrase of the opening poem, a figure that might capture the
project itself at hand, recount something as simple as a deck addition
to a home & reverberate not-so-coincidentally with the profession of
the poet's father.

These poems to my ear are at their best at their most dense - I think
I would say this of almost any poet - and yet, not unlike Bob
Perelman, McAleavey often refuses that final step off the springboard
into the level of opacity we associate, say, with something like
80 Flowers out of an ethical commitment both to
content & reader. This sometimes gives the haiku a thematic center
that puts individual pieces again midway betwixt Oppen & (of all
things) Berryman's Dream Songs, the poetry McAleavey
was most enthusiastic about when first I met him. This may, in fact,
be the first work influenced by Berryman that I can think of that
takes that formal impulse forward, precisely because it recognizes
these disparate connections. There is a world in which Berryman &
Zukofsky make perfect sense together - and this pretty much is it.
- Ron Silliman

Part hayride, part toboggan run, Huge Haiku offers
poems that get you from here to there and there to here in a
meandering hurry. They stop time and troubadour flash dazzle while
underneath a deeper wisdom lays down tracks. Read it.
- Eli Goldblatt

The poems here feature the best kind of innovation, that which retains
the old in the new but also gives readers what they have never seen
before. David McAleavey expands the form of the haiku into something
alive and incisively of our time. Through the mathematical rigor of
their stanzas and lines, the poems in Huge Haiku open
themselves out to an astonishing variety of experiences and disruptive
contrasts. Whether the subject is the natural world, the suburbs or
the city, growing up or growing older, politics or language or
absurdity, these poems never settle for easy answers, but pull us
repeatedly back into a world that's both dangerous and full of
possibility. In so doing, McAleveay takes the great virtue of
haiku-its exactness of detail-and focuses it resolutely on our own
contemporary and wildly layered strangeness.
- Mark Wallace