As Long As It's Big by John Bricuth
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The tradition of the poem as narrative storytelling is not dead despite the gradually shortening attention spans of those few who still even read or listen to poetry. All the great dead guys did it: Homer, Dante, Milton, on through my old favorites Frost and Robinson, and now more recently Andrew Hudgins, Kevin Young, and my latest hero John Bricuth. Bricuth is actually John T. Irwin, former editor of the Georgia Review and professor at Johns Hopkins University, and his new book, As Long As It’s Big is simply brilliant. In somewhat irregular pentametric tercets filled with internal rhyme, alliteration, metaphor, and all the other tricks, Bricuth sustains a two hundred page drama that is very funny and very sad and impossible to set aside until the very last line: “I, uh…think that I’m in love.” This is the tale of a couple meeting in chambers at the judge’s insistence to try one last time to avoid a divorce after twenty-seven years of marriage. Their somewhat sleazy lawyers (as only divorce lawyers can be) Mr. Fox and Mr. Bird banter asides with the judge while awaiting their clients’ arrival. Their talk shows all the shallow “good old boy” insignificance that seems to accompany the law these days. The meat of the poem, however, is in the noble story of Mr. and Mrs. Fish. It is a story that touches on Vietnam, young love, marriage, infidelity, miscarriage, suicide, career chasing, domesticity, and of course separation. Bricuth is not afraid to riff on the follies of our attempts to pair up nor to speak with eloquence on the necessity of those attempts and the fears and desires to escape that accompany them. The judge, himself divorced and debauched, finally gets around to nailing the heart of the matter: “…I know how some folks, married lots of Years, ‘ll often feel this desp’rate urge To chuck it all, start their lives from scratch, Distracted beings balanced all their days Along the knife-edge thrust between their dread Of isolation and their longings for such freedom. You know, I think that’s our defining fate – That and needing someone else as lost As we to share it with.” If you are going to read only one book this year, As Long As It’s Big might be it. Review by Bruce Jacobs, May 4, 2006
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