Walking Liberty
James Haug
NorthEastern University Press, 1999

hen I first began reading poetry I thought Charles Bukowski's The Last Night of The Earth Poems was poetry that had transformed the everyday. After all, Louise Gluck had chosen Three Oranges as one of the best American poems of the year. But the further distance travelled into poetry revealed the limitations of Bukowski. As I kept a sharp lookout for the idea behind what was attempted, I gained a better appreciation for the mechanics: the craft of lines and breaks, the art of choosing words so that in their combinations they became something new. The precise act of nothing wasted in a single line of words and how each succesive line continued the perfection, the distillment of a single thought, revealing the depth of it, the multi-faceted nature of it, without losing the original, without straying and leading the reader too far.

So when I read James Haug's poem, The Layout, in the Jan/Feb issue of APR, I was pleased. I got one of those rare smiles on my face that comes from the pleasure of reading words that identify something close to my own private nature, my sense of meaning, revealed to me by a stranger. James Haug's poem accomplished this through each succeeding stanza and then in the last four stanzas revealed a secret about life that he had observed, something true, and with his words he made it something that I too knew was true, without the slightest doubt. Sometimes this can be accomplished in a single line, a brief summation, which on its own rings true to the reader. But the art of leading the reader to it while maintaining the act of observation, the process, is difficult. If you end up with one only one good line you must kill it. The poem where each line achieves something on its own and continues to the next is a whole thing that is indistinguishable from it's separate parts.

Walking Liberty is prejudicial in reference and sometimes fails to achieve a wholeness through every observation, but Mr Haug maintains a theme and does not disappoint someone who bought the book based on the reading of a single poem. He achieves the transformation of the everday in succeeding lines and in most cases reveals something true without distracting the reader. At his best the prejudicial reference points are transparent and the words follow into lines, the lines are seamless, and the poem is completely true and whole

© Chester Morris