A Unified Theory of Light by Theodore Worozbyt

Dream Horse Press makes some ugly editorial mistakes with their 2005 National Poetry Chapbook Prize Winner, Theodore Worozbyt. In the table of contents, “Corn” is listed as “Our Bodies are Chords”. There’s at least one questionable spelling and one stanza-spacing anomaly. Nothing awful, but the acknowledgements page, listing which magazines previously published any poems, includes four poems which are not in the book.

Most frustrating is “Scarecrow”. After 108 lines (the poem’s true end), we return to line 76 (in mid-sentence) and pick back up. I figured I was getting dumber again, missing some hip post-modern twist, but no — it was just the press’s goof. I know from firsthand experience that small, independent poetry publishers are underfinanced, understaffed, and deserve a break. But this mess in under 30 pages? Come on.

Combine all that with uneven poems — many deliciously put-down-able, a few pretty awesome — and you’ve got a real shame.

Ambiguity’s a good thing, but determining something as basic and necessary as the relationship between the two guys in “Chess” is difficult. Irony and finding the grand in the ground is fine too, but the mock-praising of corn in “Corn” is mighty worn after 40 lines, especially when kernels become imagistically fused with stars in the climactic, truly corny conclusion (but maybe that was the point, right?).

In “Sadness”, Worozbyt does what my middle school students in DC used to do: personify an emotion, showing its day-to-day life. His poem is, I think, slightly better than most of theirs and was published in New England Review. The middle chunk of “Mollusk” does a solid job of being sexually suggestive while retaining a literal meaning, but the rest is dry and limp; Poetry published that one in 1991.

Even though the 11 similes “Neighborhood Light” all pour into the closing image of a couple after making love — which might have been better off as an opener — those similes’ development over 12 tercets is the most gorgeous and thematically cohesive writing in the collection, tracing light’s movement from edge of the known universe to galaxy to our atmosphere, all the way down to cave fish.

The poems here are best when Worozbyt is just kind of going for it. In “Past Naming”, the issue is something like this: we’re given names at birth, but they are not adequate identity badges, so he creates a bunch for his grandfather. Opening with “Now what do I call you?” then launching into a richly varied litany of Ginsberg-ish epithets (“Foiled Fisherman with a Stack / of Naked Magazines in the Laundryroom, / Wizard of Hay-Stiff Bitter Strawberries “), the poem closes “How can I remember a name, the name your mother gave you?”

The last one, “runne softly, till I end my Song”, succeeds where “Neighborhood Light” barely goofed. It’s an echo of Spenser’s “Prothalamion” (wedding song) and, appropriately, all the concrete images, both natural and human, are evened out by the “It was… It was… It was” anaphora, riveting the poem to the kind of controlled ecstasy that Worozbyt is very, very good at.

Still, I’m left shrugging. Worozbyt is a talented poet, and these poems were published in magazines anywhere between two and 17 years ago, so they’re in this particular order for a very particular reason, but I’ve missed it. Dream Horse Press, warts and all, has presented an iffy winner.