Review: Tradition

Tradition by Daniel Khalastchi
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In "Tradition," Daniel Khalastchi does his best to fulfill the aesthetic of shock--that is, that the quality of the poetry depends on how shocked you can make the reader. Juxtaposing disconnected actions and images suggests that the world does not make sense, but also that, perhaps, the poet is trying too hard.

... An hour passed before
you asked if I was bleeding, and
when I couldn't answer

you struck me again. Do you
think, you said later, our air
depleting while we shared

the last throat lozenge, that male
high school girls' basketball
coaches feel their athletes are

the reason they have such distance
in their marriages? I don't
know, I said. I do, you

said, and you began to
dig us a tunnel with your
teeth...

The collection is filled with death and copulation, suggesting I suppose, our lives. But it all seems overheated, strained. I respect the attempt at the 21st Century version of the Surreal. But it does not work for me here.

The exception is the long "Poem for My Father," which expresses deeper emotions as it suggest a biography we want to know more about. Here the juxtapositions seem to fit a real life and individuality. Here we experience poetry with some power. The rest of the collection pales in comparison.




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