Below is a review I wrote back in 2003 and had forgotten about. It appeared in Main Street Rag (Winter, 2003) and I just discovered it in an archive on their current MSR Reading Series site. I didn’t have a copy of it since I lost all my older writings, but now like magic…. Voila! Back from the electron void:
FROM THE SCENIC OUTLOOK THE BATTLEFIELD CHURNS BEAUTIFULLY
by Thomas M. CassidyGreen Bean Press (2002) 88 pgs.
ISBN: 1891408283 $10
PoetryFrom first glance at the title and poem titles such as “One Stormy Petrol With Cheese Hold the Mayo,” I thought this to be a collection of Dada-pop beautifully churning the language in chaotic, acrobatic fits. I was wrong, though not on the acrobatics, just on the style.
Cassidy is the traditional acrobat who has built a small town circus tent and performs in plain language with simple imagery that all the more reveals us for who we truly are. His complex message simply delivered: there is a battlefield, America.
This is the art of cultural recycling, pulling back the mask where something like the idyllic suburban community of Love Canal becomes synonymous with everything horrific.
Cassidy (a performance poet) knows how to work crowds and is a master at getting just beneath the surface of things, which he does well in this collection of quietly screaming Middle American angst. You could say he is rebel and doomsayer clown in one. He makes us laugh while understanding the need to cry.
In “How I’m Destroying America,” the advertising wasteland has arrived with its drowning flood of commercials, fliers, and products. So he quietly rebels by ceasing to participate. He rejects driving, golfing, shopping, etc., in a pages-long diatribe against products, promotions, and activities. It is a “scream aloud in the middle of Wal-Mart,” symbolic of a nation teetering on the edge of commercial apocalypse.
All is not well in America. This is a strong book that makes hard, yet poignant statements. There is palpable nostalgia for a simpler childhood, a slower, kinder, less expensive age of laughter and innocence—the irony of giddy boys reading comic books sharing a soda on the porch of the neighborhood store. In one bookstore full of coverless comics and other cheap, used items, I realize that the Old Lady is so miserable / because she has to sell us kids all her incredible stuff / watch it all go out the door for good. This older America is disappearing for good, as we watch it being sold into the modern machine.
The quiet subversive adds this indictment of artistic poverty and commercial excess in America, in the final and title poem: I could open up a coffee shop/ do it half-assed with dirty mugs and dirty thoughts/open it right next to a thriving Starbucks…/and this sad sucker punching mismanaged afterthought/ unnecessary detail pothole/ would make more during its first day of doing business/ than I make in a year of carefully writing poetry.
Which highlights exquisitely the tragedy of a starving writer reviewing another writer starving.
Reviewed by Thomas Fortenberry