Bend, Don't Shatter

Rita D. Costello

The most amazing thing about this collection is the folks they got to blurb it. The back cover contains high praise from poet Mark Doty ("These poems are for every young person who feels alone and full of longing...") and Academy of American Poets Associate Director Charles Flowers ("These poems find their power in a language forged by desire and survival..."). The introduction, by David Groff, promises that "The poems in Bend, Don't Shatter will pluck chords in you, chords so complex and resonant that you feel them in your spine. You'll hear truths so exact you can't explain them." I hear stuff like this and I expect to be blown away by what's between these covers.

Honestly, I should have known better. The narrower the theme for an anthology, the more inconsistent the poetry therein is liable to be. An anthology of love poems puts you on pretty solid ground. An anthology of teen love poems (putting aside for the moment that the ratio of good teen love poems to bad teen love poems is smaller, perhaps, than any ratio of good to bad in the whole realm of art) is going to cause that ground to sift under you. When you constrict it to gay teen love poems, you're pretty much ensuring you're going to pull the rug out from under yourself. What do you think's going to happen when you confine it to poets writing about the inception of gay teen love?

The reason for this is simple: the ratio of good poetry to bad poetry in the world is already so small that the restrictions are bound to find you swimming in mountains of bad poetry, while you may not find even a single piece that's actually poetic. From that standpoint, Bend, Don't Shatter is actually a resounding success. There are, in fact, whole poems in this anthology that deserve, that demand, to be read. Fine pieces of work that truly understand what poetry is all about. They get "show, don't tell" right. They draw the picture and let the reader figure out the story.

Unfortunately, most of the collection does not. As should be expected, you've got your fill of message poetry that would be exactly the same written out in prose. You have a couple of astonishingly bad formal pieces scattered throughout for good measure (the rest, of course, being free verse). You have some pieces that show real potential, where a line here or there is truly excellent, but the rest needs serious work. In one particular case in this anthology, you have a piece that starts off brilliant and, before your eyes, degenerates not only into message poetry, but the kind of horrible message poetry that could only sound good read from a soapbox on a streetcorner by some guy wearing a backwards collar, being laughed at by passersby.

Interestingly, the anthology gets better as it goes on; I've no idea if the editors intended this effect, but the closer you get to the back of the book, in general, the better the stuff you're going to find. (One is tempted to counsel the reader to read it backwards.) In particular, Scott Hightower's "Cruising a Hungry World" is fantastic, a really good formal poem in an age when really good formal poems are few and far between (it has not escaped this author's notice that one of the best formal poets extant today, Marilyn Hacker, is both gay and infatuated with the sestina, and that Hacker's influence is worn thick on Higtower; that said, there are far worse influences to have, and most poets seem to have them).

By all means, give this a look, as long as you don't mind wading through swine to find a few pearls.