Bangor Daily News

Monday, October 2, 2006

                Troy Casa has been an enthusiastic champion for the Greater Bangor poetry scene in recent years, organizing time and space at Borders Books for local pro-am poetry readings and hosting the occasional celebrity, such as Gerald Stern. His own works, offered in his chapbook the stark realities that surround Texas are tuned to some of the major preoccupations of post-Vietnam American verse.

                Many of these poems concern deeply personal emotions, speaking to and of a son, Keats, and reflecting on the fear, anxiety, pain and hope for joy that go with intimate personal relationships. At the same time, the feelings are mainly suggested rather than evoked. Characteristic of our time, the terse, ratiocinative language tends to conceal or at least muffle the emotions and the contexts that surround them.

               “One Good Roll of the Die” begins:

                I just wanted to tell her

                that I’ve made all my mistakes twice

                and none that could kill me

                and then goes on to mention a buried gun, a beagle and falling from a churchtop in Reno, images suggesting a narrative that’s hard to fill in, as there are two few words even to guess who “her” is. What emotional or rational place we are intended to occupy is uncertain, though both modes of experience seem diligently at work in the poet.

                In “On Reading Mrs. Olds' Father” Casa has the good sense to call out the facades on which Sharon Olds built a whole po-biz career in the 1970’s and 1980’s, but the poems allusions are so compressed that much of what’s absent remains, in the end, absent. These poems are elusively allusive, hinting at experiences and emotions deeply felt but not really disclosed. Proponents of the notion that poetry is essentially an exercise in the writer’s own, personal self-expression, are likely to be well-satisfied by the stark realities that surround Texas .

       For readers with other ideas, more links than hints seem needed, but Casa’s control of clipped rhythms and sharp imagery may promise larger possibilities.

--Dana Wilde

______________________________________________________________________________________

Bangor Daily News

November 28, 2006

Dead Among the Whales

He walked down to the pier

and jumped.

They said

he wanted nothing more than

the bloody belly of a whale

to bring him back

to the Pemaquid,

where he could gracefully die

in that deepest deep 

of mammalian sighs.

The dolphins keep

the sharks at bay

while

         two   old   broken   schooners

sail on to heaven,

twelve children stroking

their soggy-wood-salt-skin.

In circles,

a helicopter whirrs.

Rescue workers

bleating back and forth

across a viscous sea,

warns the others

of this love,

      and loss.