New Route in the Dream by Greg Kosmicki
New Route in the Dream
by Greg Kosmicki
Pudding House, 2010
35 pages; paperback $10
Reviewed by Yu-Han Chao
If you think of your UPS driver and picture some sort of superhuman machine, braving the snow blizzard in a wide-open truck in khaki shorts, you might be wrong. S/he is most likely very human, and may be, in fact, a poet. And s/he has nightmares of being trapped in the UPS truck, driving “always a new route in the dream” (33). The mundane reference seems an appropriate title, as Greg Kosmicki’s poems are not flashy or overwritten; they quietly contemplate old pianos, new routes, undelivered packages, and turning fifty.
Kosmicki’s images and verbs surprise readers: “There comes a time in everyone’s life / when the old tricks will not do, / the shot will not molest the hoop […] the lap you run is your tongue / around the plate” (8). The basketball “molesting” the hoop presents a discomforting sexual image, while the tongue running laps around the plate presents an act both suggestive and sad. On the first warm day of spring the poet sees “a fly / that must have weighed thirty-five pounds / corkscrew through the haze of sun and glass” (31) and thinks how life would be grand if he and his wife were both thirty-five pound flies “careening toward some middle-aged fat guy” (31). Here, “corkscrew” effectively expresses the trajectory of the grotesque and humorous image of an impossibly heavy fly.
The theme of growing old carries over as the poet imagines an old piano purchased from a friend as “actually somebody’s mother” with a bald head, beard, and “warts grown out so big” (18). Perhaps the female version of Elliot’s Prufrock, Kosmicki’s piano enjoys a better fate, because the poet promises his daughters will sit in its lap, “stroke the bones of [its] old fingers” (18) and the piano will reciprocate by singing back to them.
The children grow up, the poet quits his delivery job and moves with his family, but UPS haunts him long after that, in recurring nightmares where there is “always a different delivery problem […] can’t get the packages delivered” (33). It’s humbling to think that a poet who has been published in over 100 magazines including Paris Review once drove a UPS truck, and is still having bad dreams about it.
Next time my UPS driver unhappily rings my doorbell at 7PM and complains to me about his boss, I will be more sympathetic.
Yu-Han Chao is Poetry Editor at the Rose & Thorn Journal. Her poetry book, We Grow Old, was published by the Backwaters Press. Visit her writing and artwork at her web site.
Your review made me want to read this poet's work and write a poem about delivering packages to people.
I love my UPS driver friend. Maybe I'll pick her brain for some info.
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love this . . .
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