A Salmon Press poetry release

Big Men Speaking to Little Men by Philip Fried, Salmon Poetry,
Cliffs of Moheer, Country Clare, Ireland. www.salmonpoetry.com.
103 pages. 12.99 Eurodollars.


Let me start off with the title, Big Men Speaking to Little
Men. What Fried has done here is to take ALL-HISTORY, ALL-ART, ALL
LITERATURE and somehow relate it to our Yankee-Gringo Here and Now.
So get ready for a long swim in the ocean of World Culture.
And because of Fried's larger cultural overview, his comments
on the contemporary scene have a lot more impact and power. As in
this poem Mauvaise Foiâ (Bad Faith):
We are the tardy witnesses,
but not the angels, of history.
For us the grandeur is summoned and
buttressed by a faith in facts,
the losses religiously noted. We travel
with a bad conscience, as necessary
as passport and money, a nagging ache,
like a sensitive tooth the tongue worries.
And everywhere we go the chairs
worship in the empty cathedrals.

(p.47)


He can't even get dressed without living through all-history:

Naked I dream of clothing's prehistory,
The hats that were given by gods to show
Mastery; a numinous aura, with plumes
Or crowns that were horns, and the long sleeves


2.

Devised by the mountain folk who carried
The lofty cold so close to their skin.


(Getting Dressed, p.87)


In the midst of all this playgrounding around, though, there is
a powerful message that contemporary Americans, by restricting and
limiting themselves in terms of ALL-CULTURE, are losing all the
refinements and extras that go with life on planet Earth and beyond:

In a patina of green oxide
with the world's heartbeat in his hair....
the bodiless dance is always beginning...
not even dust of our dust survives
the death of worlds
but ecstasy,
snippet in a teeming void,
a curl of possibility,
a tickling on the lip of Nothing....
worlds are born with the lilt of a hair.

(Dancing Shiva, p.28)

What you come away with after reading through Fried is that we
are tiny, so lost in time and culture that we are barely here at
all, and the only thing that makes any sense isn't any form of
negativity, but an enthusiastic rushing into life/experience.
It's amazing how Fried can take a golf-course image and turn it
into
3.
a sermon about cosmological existentialism:

God comes along with the caddy cart
and ah those charmed holes when the world
is down to grapefruit size I mean
the whole juicy universe

no wonder our heavens are fitting better
into the children's unborn pockets
later when one of them hands you a lovely
marble it's hard with loss and inward

with bubbles of constellations that tickle
us as we lie on the greens supine
on summer nights a thoughtful blade
of grass in our teeth as we take in the bigness.


(Say It Happens, pp.60-61)


Not a book to browse through but meditate through like St.
Augustine's Confessions.



Hugh Fox/Ibbetson Update/July 2006.