I picked this book out from the “new books” shelf at the library based on its title (I do like Proust!) and its cover, which is letterpress-printed and lovely, an old street map with great type. I flipped the book open and whatever poem I saw (I don’t remember which one it was) was good enough, or at least intriguing enough, for me to check it out.
According to the publisher’s website, “Escape from Combray presents an intimate cycle of poems exploring the growing sense of urban ennui and dislocation affecting a generation of Americans. Snyder’s poems evokes a psychogeographic landscape where quotidian symbols of the working class juxtapose with the timeless profundity of Proust, Virgil, and Dante.”
On first my first read-through of this collection (it’s just 75 pages, and easy enough to read on the train to work and the train home), it was the quotidian landscape of the poems I liked best, the convenience stores and sidewalks, Chicago weather, the sun in winter “setting fast/as if it too were cold,” as Snyder puts it in “Decoy” (52). I like the poetic persona here: someone who stays up late reading Dante (in “The World Below”), who notices words and signs: signs for cold beer in Spanish and Polish, or a sign looking for temps “a las 4:30/en la fucking manana” (61), and who captures the image of an empty store at closing time (in “How Are You Doing”) with the images of “a bin of flip-flops/and Tasmanian Devil/baseball caps,” “freshly-mopped floors/and fluorescent lights” (16).
But on a second reading, I liked the literariness, too, which comes with a certain amount of wryness and play: like when, in “Postpoem” (it might be an ominous sign for that to be the name of the first piece in a collection, but it works), Snyder talks about a “periphrasis so elaborate/that even Virgil gets a little cross,/though he won’t show it, or wear it” (9).
One of my favorites, both times through, was “Erasmus,” which you can read here, on John Latta’s blog (and while you’re there, read the letter immediately after it, plus the passage from Preserved Smith’s Erasmus that follows it.
Tangentially: do you look things up when you read (words, places, people)? I’m definitely a looker-upper, sometimes an over-looker-upper, in that I look things up that aren’t crucial to understanding a book/chapter/passage, and things that I won’t remember in a day or so: so you might argue that I might as well not have looked them up at all. But it brings me joy. Like when Rick Snyder, in a poem, mentions walking down Fullerton Ave. past “Lowell-Berteau Plating,” and I find out that there is a “Berteau-Lowell Plating” and find it on Google Maps and look at its sign in street view and look at pictures of a few blocks of Fullerton Ave. while I’m at it.
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