The Lord and the General Din of the World
Jane Mead
Sarabande Books, Louisville, KY, 1996
ISBN 0—9641151—1—5

his is what Philip Levine says about Jane Mead's poetry in his introduction to the book: Her language is a constant source of delight and alarm. It seldom crosses the page in order to entertain us. It prefers to leap out of its own darkness with the suddenness of something wild and catch us by the throat. It is what poetry has always been, risky and untamable.

This is what I say about her poetry:

It hits you like a two—hundred pound scalpel. It cuts through to your innermost sensibilities with no wasted motion and generates a visceral reaction with a force that almost knocks you down. This is not cool, detached poetry:

My body thinks she is the moon
but she is a clown and I
am all music and unbearably
weighted down. My small dog

on the pillow, upside down,
wiggles her feet, my mean dog
would kill for me, my old dog
cries all night for me to kill her.

Jane Mead is alive in her words in a way that makes me think I have spent my life sleeping by comparison. She wrings poetry out of her father's drug addiction and out of a trip to K—Mart to buy a filing cabinet:

What I wanted was a solid exchange
of cash for steel, but
the surcharge — that hallucinatory
exchange of pleasantries
that turns existence to the air
around a curtsy — was more
than I could pay
and I kept driving.

The images she chooses are not arcane and are all the more powerful for it.

In the morning, sitting in my nightgown by the window,
I watch the light seep around the corners of Glen's Garage.
Yellow, orange, blue. Colors of the rainbow
or the sky rising. Colors on the rusted plates
on the rusted cars. Cars with their toes turned up,
tires sold, fenders missing. Cars from all over, with maps
of stars on the windshields where heads have smashed.

There is something both exalting and humbling in this book, which is Jane Mead's first. Exalting because there is a bone—deep thrill in responding to her words. Humbling because I know that no matter how well I ever write, I will never be able to write like this.

For me, this is every bit as good as the best of the best that I have read — Butcher, Heaney, Hass, Strand, Levine, Forche, even Transtromer. I purchased the book because I was so impressed with one of the author's poems that I found on—line. It is now on the shelf alongside the small collection of other books that I turn to in order to re—experience the feeling of what poetry can do.

Jane Mead again:

Go to your phonograph. Put on
Brandenburg Concerto Number Six.

This is about something very hard.
— This is about trying to live with that music
playing in the back of your mind.

— About trying to live in a world
with that kind of music.

Jane Mead's book of poems, The Lord and the General Din of the World, is that kind of music.

© John Boddie