Dropping Death by Duane Esposito and Ralph Nazareth, Yuganta Press, 2018. 66pp. $10.00
Review by Pramila Venkateswaran
Duane Esposito’s and Ralph Nazareth’s collaborative poetic efforts portray that inquiries about human existence are universal although couched in different forms, languages, and perspectives. Although the title proclaims to drop the subject of death, as one suggested meaning, death looms large in the book’s inquiry. The poets drop death on its head as it were, so it is broken open. What we find is the human dilemma: do I quietly go away or do I rage against the dying of the light? As Duane Esposito writes in these evocative lines,
“When my time to die--
that consciousness I
can’t recall—arrives--
having said goodbye
to the ones who are worth
my saying goodbye to--
impossibly hard to leave behind
the things & people I love…”
Ralph Nazareth’s prose poems, often written in the third person and a contrast from the narrow columns of Esposito’s exquisitely chiseled verse, explore the transitoriness of each moment, like the childhood image of seeing the father walk stooped on the road, or the woman in the train window. The moment is fleeting: “the train speeds away. And she with it. The trees behind me stir, uproot, gather momentum, whirl about, turning into a vortex of receding energy.” We feel like we are being whooshed the “mystery of origins without a traceable beginning.” Using the analogy of Icarus’s fall going unnoticed by anyone, including the “torturer’s horse,” this dimension of our knowledge or lack thereof portrayed by W.H. Auden in “Musee Des Beaux Arts,” Nazareth observes that Death happens all the time around us, but we go on with life. The disasters and urgencies are too numerous to bear, but we do, going in and out of despair.
Esposito’s poems, economical in language and form, stand as book ends to Nazareth’s prose poems. Esposito’s poems are like signposts marking birth and death, with Nazareth’s poems wading through the messy stuff of life. Philosophical concepts like consciousness and God abound in Nazareth’s verse. Of note are: “found myself nailed to god in the web of my own making;” “I felt God’s presence in my heart but… the inexplicable;” or “she might have rubbed my hands gently as if to say let go….;” or, consciousness described as a “fused knob of wood.” We see the backdrop of something exotic, whether an abstract space in the imagination or the India of the poet’s youth, in the short, crisp sentences like “words deepen with an uncanny glow. Streets flow silver. Faces and sidewalks step out of light.”
Imagine thinking through a problem and finding the light but not being able to express your breakthrough? Esposito’s poem “At the Least” ends the book with a Wittgenstinian call to silence: “I hear what silence means--/ unlocatable.” The book invites us to hold both silence and sound, light and dark, death and life, mystery and mundanity, even if we drop death often but unable to part with it.
“When my time to die--
that consciousness I
can’t recall—arrives--
having said goodbye
to the ones who are worth
my saying goodbye to--
impossibly hard to leave behind
the things & people I love…”
Ralph Nazareth’s prose poems, often written in the third person and a contrast from the narrow columns of Esposito’s exquisitely chiseled verse, explore the transitoriness of each moment, like the childhood image of seeing the father walk stooped on the road, or the woman in the train window. The moment is fleeting: “the train speeds away. And she with it. The trees behind me stir, uproot, gather momentum, whirl about, turning into a vortex of receding energy.” We feel like we are being whooshed the “mystery of origins without a traceable beginning.” Using the analogy of Icarus’s fall going unnoticed by anyone, including the “torturer’s horse,” this dimension of our knowledge or lack thereof portrayed by W.H. Auden in “Musee Des Beaux Arts,” Nazareth observes that Death happens all the time around us, but we go on with life. The disasters and urgencies are too numerous to bear, but we do, going in and out of despair.
Esposito’s poems, economical in language and form, stand as book ends to Nazareth’s prose poems. Esposito’s poems are like signposts marking birth and death, with Nazareth’s poems wading through the messy stuff of life. Philosophical concepts like consciousness and God abound in Nazareth’s verse. Of note are: “found myself nailed to god in the web of my own making;” “I felt God’s presence in my heart but… the inexplicable;” or “she might have rubbed my hands gently as if to say let go….;” or, consciousness described as a “fused knob of wood.” We see the backdrop of something exotic, whether an abstract space in the imagination or the India of the poet’s youth, in the short, crisp sentences like “words deepen with an uncanny glow. Streets flow silver. Faces and sidewalks step out of light.”
Imagine thinking through a problem and finding the light but not being able to express your breakthrough? Esposito’s poem “At the Least” ends the book with a Wittgenstinian call to silence: “I hear what silence means--/ unlocatable.” The book invites us to hold both silence and sound, light and dark, death and life, mystery and mundanity, even if we drop death often but unable to part with it.
