The Birds Are on Fire by Kay Sloan

Every year, Finishing Line books publishes 30 chapbooks by unknown poets. I’ve read four now, and all are tastefully designed with lovely cover art and the thrill-frill of author photographs. Minus some odd cover paper, this seems like the works — all rare, difficult stuff for a small publisher to do.

The poetry itself is consistently mediocre.

This collection won Finishing Line’s New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition, but there is nothing new about Sloan’s work, which is so competently common I have trouble envisioning it beating out a boxful of manuscripts. She has two novels, The Patron Saint of Red Chevys and Worry Beads, and poems have appeared in some top magazines, but all that’s meaningless. This first book of poems is at once green and stale.

I don’t believe narrative poetry is dead or even merely quaint in American poetry, but it sure is a drag in this collection, which purports to be global — poems are set in Brussels, Amsterdam, Ali Pasha, Sacramento — but ultimately remains too self-satisfied, finally settling into a groove of well-rehearsed mother-daughter relationship poems.

In “Breakfast at Keseberg’s Diner” and “From the Women’s Asylum”, it’s like Sloan wants the pretty look and symmetry of form, even if it doesn’t fit. There’s lots of alleged “craft” in this book, as Sloan goes plupping along through formal exercises. We have a creaky villanelle, visually neat stanzas with no real rhetorical structure, and the concrete title poem about 11 September (which uses a cute little bird-shape!).

However genuine the experiences described in these poems may be, the poems are almost invariably ruined by posing. In “Close-Ups and Long Shots”, a tequila-drunk speaker considers calling an ex- after sleeping with someone new, referencing Greta Garbo, Aphrodite, James Cagney, Clark Gable, Bette Davis, etc. It closes “So let it be the late night movie / instead: the television glows / black and white with lovers / grown decades old, forever / rehearsing the same old scripts.” There are stock phrases and then there are stock passages, lines any poet could have written, and none of them worthy of serious attention.

By the time we get to “The First Glaciers”, my marginal notes are just heckling: near “We walked midnight streets on psychedelics / measuring time by the fading of colors”, I have written “Wow, man.” I’m not exactly proud of that, nor of another moment where I wrote “Get the [mean bad word] real”, but that’s what happened on first reading. Upon second reading, little changed.

But what really drives me nuts is something like “Wicks”, a decent poem that tries too hard:

At the end of the tunnel, long-desired

and long-delayed, who knows where the light

comes from, if not within ourselves,

as we illuminate the space

around our moving bodies, leaving

tracks of melted wax to mark the way […]

We’d be OK stopping there, but Sally Struthers comes scrambling in, each slow lash-blink a sob of emphasis, “for our children.” We really don’t need this.

Here’s the thing: Kay Sloan is a competent narrative poet, and there are a few good poems here, covering common subjects in common manners. It’s an effort at conventional American poetry — nothing special. In that regard, it succeeds.