Expended Casings; Poems or Not By Alan Farrell (2007)
Reviewed by David A. Willson, shown in his study to right:
Alan Farrell served in Vietnam with the 5th Special Forces Group. He was wounded in action and decorated for his heroism.
The first thing this reader noticed about this book was how beautiful it is. The author is pictured both on the front and back cover. Between these covers are 47 pages of poems and prose poems—a total of a dozen pieces. Some of the pieces are comic. Some are tragic. Some are tragi-comic. The titles of the poems sometimes are a signal to the reader as to whether the piece is a serious one or not.
For instance there’s a piece entitled, “Joe Lunchbox Went to War.” It sounds potentially funny. I was in the mood for humor, so I read that one first. It starts off, “When Joe Lunchbox went to war…” I’m not sure if it turned out funny or not. You read it and you tell me.
The sometimes whimsical titles run the gamut from “Ditty Dum Dum Ditty” to “Jungle Chocolate.”
The titles made me want to read the poems. That’s a good thing.
My favorite poem in the book is entitled “Index of First Lines,” located on the last page of the book. It has a great first line, but every other line is great, too. Here we go. Hang on tight.
All along the fish-hook line…
By the shores
Come live with me…
From the sources which well…
How do I…
I met a traveler…
In Flanders Fields…
Listen my children…
She walks…
The Antiseptic Baby and the Prophylactic pup…
There was a king reigned in the East…
This is the forest primeval…
Three things made earth unquiet…
To Citizen…
T’was brillig…
We’ve fought with many men…
What are the bugles playin’ for…
When a man hath no freedom…
Whenas in silks my Julia…
You know we French stormed Ratisbon…
Farrell built this amazing poem out of found materials. It is a bit fragmented, but life is like that these days. Poetry often reflects modern life. It can do that. And effectively, too. Farrell’s use of first lines from poems by Shelley, Browning, Kipling, Byron, Herrick and of course Arthur Guiterman, from whom he got the line beginning, “The Antiseptic Baby and the Prophylactic pup…” is inspired and a nice homage to those poets from whom Farrell learned much of his craft.
In poem after poem, Farrell uses repetition to fine effect. In “Fighting Position” we read:
A few miserable days
Then move
On.
In the next stanza it becomes:
A few miserable minutes
Then move
On
And so on, through the remaining stanzas.
Years ago when I first read Farrell’s poetry, I noticed certain things about the structure of his poetry, but I spent no time deconstructing it, analyzing it. I noticed Farrell had a fondness for recurring phrases in his poems and that those phrases, when I read them aloud, hammered away at the consciousness not so very subtly, but with great effectiveness in getting the point across. The point wasn’t always the important message of the poem, but it was usually effective in promoting a chuckle or some other low level reaction.
Alan Farrell has produced a fine little book of verse. The poems are rigorously structured works that act as platforms to support his poetry of ideas and philosophy. There’s the occasional period, question mark or ellipses, but mostly these poems are not punctuated. The line breaks signal where to pause and where to stop. Farrell is a thinker from the academy, not a stream of consciousness smeller of pretty posies that caught his wandering blue eye. Far from it. If a pretty girl wove some bright posies into his hair, that would be a different thing altogether.
I’m thrilled to see this. Thank you David, Alan, and Dan.