Two chapbooks by RJ. McCaffery
Eye Dialect Press

true bibliophile loves everything about books: — big books, little books, their color, their smell, their contents, even their shortcomings. When it comes to chapbooks, then, because of their modest dimensions, we want something special.

RJ McCaffery has released two tiny chapbooks, each in a numbered edition of 200 copies. Their content deserves appropriate specific comment, but first an introduction to their simple charm seems appropriate. The construction is so graceful, and has been accomplished with such delicacy and finesse that our true bibliophile will want to imagine that the poet himself mounted them, and if not that they were assembled with love by a special person who loves the poems, and perhaps loves the poet, too. But to their description: both on fine paper and with a modest easily-legible type font (with an almost microscopic, provocative serif). The covers are a heavier stiff paper and when the book is opened to its center, the bundle proves to be sewn in two vertical stitches with a silky embroidery or crewel thread of several strands.

Anyone who spends a little time lurking or participating in poetry forums on the internet won't take long to realize that these poems speak with authority. The first, with a handsome lightly-ribbed blue cover whose silky texture suggests that it might have been colored by being saturated with a metallic blue ink, and sewed with a matching thread, is titled The Hymnal Week. It contains sixteen poems, introduced with a useful preamble about McCaffery's interest in and experiments with his particular response to certain sonorities of language, as opposed to the standard approach through syllables or metrics. The poems themselves are clearly examples of the results of those studies, although many readers can be expected to respond most enthusiastically to "Blue Sestina" a poem composed only of end-words for each line, and whose envoi leaves no questions about what is the subject of the poem.

On the other hand, phonemes?

"I prop up my feet, pluck my guitar, are are are, is is is;
    your songs I've missed,

or:

"Bone-ringed like trees, layered outward, fracture prone,
  fiber gone dry which drove once, this deer
    spring—bolting through bracken.

I haven't seen a line like that since Hopkins.

The second offering (it's called Anchor Ice) is a muted dark red that could be dried blood except for a sense that sunshine has fallen on it and somehow left its mark. The silken thread that holds the physical book together is a raffish chartreuse. (For humor? For fun?).and the seventeen poems range from "Kitchen Sink Devotional," a rhapsody on hands, to venues as far afield as "The Great Molasses Flood" (in Boston, 1919). Don't expect these poems to lead you along a daisy-strewn path to Lollipop Land. They're going to demand an investment of time and attention that will match the investment that went into writing them. The reward will come back again and again as you find yourself walking down any old habitual street and muttering "with a foot—shift and sway . . . hands pluck and twist, flip the canned palm hearts clear of the grapes . . . "

© Sandy McKinney