No Other World

Robert E. McDonough

I don't quite know what to make of Robert McDonoough's collection of poems No Other World; half of it is witty, mature, and captivating, while the other half sounds as if it were composed by a teen poet in love. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but most folk are probably going to cringe from poems with titles like “The Poet's Lady Compared to 42nd Street Between Times Square and Fifth Avenue” (note that this is, obviously, before the cleanup) and “Like Almost Everything Else, Discussing Pornography Leads me to Think of You.” The funny thing being that the latter is one of the book's more accomplished poems. Go figure.

McDonough is always, at least, likable. Sometimes to an absurd degree. The voice that comes through these pieces is one of enthusiastic sharing of experience, rather than the didacticism or cool detachment that have been so popular in American poetry since the days of Pound and Eliot. McDonough manages to take narrative form, graft it onto lyric poetry, and infect the reader with his own love of life, not easy things to do (and especially not simultaneously).

So why am I only giving it three stars? Mostly because no matter how likable you are, bad teen love poetry is bad teen love poetry, even (especially) when written by someone who's been a University professor for eighteen years:

“You're my Bryant Park in spring
and my Library, lofty reading room
tied to endless buried knowledge
with just this difference:
you make my lions roar.”
(“The Poet's Lady Compared…”)

Thankfully, that stuff is countered by things like:

“…At the opening I met
a woman who'd blown off half her hair
lighting a furnace. She said,
‘The beautician was very good
at covering the bald parts.' She patted
her hair, and for a second it seemed
she would show me her scars.”

There is definitely some worthy material here. Worth picking up.