If You Should See Me Walking on the Road

In If You Should See Me Walking on the Road, J.R. Solonche’s poems have the grace of Dickinson, the exuberance of Neruda, and the wintry darkness of Frost. In riddles, haikus, aphorisms, odes, and prose poems, Solonche praises the objects and beings of this world – a desk, a sunflower, a wastepaper basket, a hawk dismembering its prey on his lawn, a dog in a car with Alaska plates. He feels joy while pretending to be a tree for his daughter’s game of tag, but cannot find solace in easy spirituality. When told by a stranger in “Blackbird” that the bird follows him because he has “a great soul,” the poet balks: “The day I believe that is the day/I commit suicide without leaving a note.” In his prose poem, “On Being Asked by a Child to Teach Her How to Tell Time,” the poet takes a Borgesian, paradoxical pleasure in explaining how to read a calendar: “You make up the story as you turn the pages. The problem is the faster you turn them, the shorter the story becomes.” The expansive voice then snaps back into the near-silence of a frozen lake under layers of snow and ice. Don’t be fooled by the puns -- these poems are never light. If we should see Solonche walking on the road…/(his) hair matted, the rain running like long/slender plaits of silver hair down (his) neck,/and he’s smiling, we should worry. We’re next.

Hilary Sideris