It seems like forever since I’ve written any poetry of my own. The last time I really worked at it was Jan 2001, I believe, when I tried to write a poem a day. That lasted all of January and a few days into February before I abandoned the pursuit. I’ve written maybe two or three poems since that time, but in the last decade I’ve pretty much given up the notion of ever writing another. Which is unfortunate, because I really did enjoy the feeling when I was deep in the throes of a poetry run. But they’re not always easy.

Of course some writers would give the illusion poetry is a snap. Peter Straub, for instance.

I recently read his poetry collection, LEESON PARK AND BELSIZE SQUARE: Poems 1970-1975, published in 1983 just before his King collaboration THE TALISMAN. This wasn’t his first poetry collection, either; his bibliography lists the collections MY LIFE IN PICTURES (1971), ISHMAEL, and OPEN AIR (both from 1972). For anyone without the resources to track down these, I’m sure, hard to get collections, LEESON PARK AND BELSIZE SQUARE reprints portions of them.

As to the quality of the poems…I only said I used to write a lot of poetry, I never said anything about reading a lot of it. The reason is simple, I just don’t understand a lot of poetry. I mean, it’s written in English, which I read very well, but a lot of times, when I read a poem, I find myself getting caught up in the rhythm of the words and the beauty of the images or the brilliance of a word choice here and there. And I oftentimes completely lose the sense of what the poem is actually about, what the author was saying with these lines. And it happened again with this collection. I even read it twice. But as I’ve said in many many other reviews, Peter Straub is a great writer. He’s as close as I’ve seen to a PERFECT writer. And as a lover of perfect writing, I keep losing myself in the words and the rhythms, and in the end I couldn’t tell you what the hell the poem I just read was about (this most often happens to me when someone gives me a poem and says here read this, I think it’s great. I read it and hand it back and say yeah, that was good, when in reality, one or two exceptions aside, I never get the sense of a poem on a first read).

I know collectively, the poems were written, obviously, between 1970 and 1975, and I’m going to say they were written when Straub was living in Dublin and London: the title of the book comes from the places he lived in those cities. I don’t recognize any unifying themes carried throughout the length of the collection, although some crop up for a span here and there such as a group of poems written in the specific styles of various other authors, for example the long poem “Withstanding, Saving, Moving” is broken into smaller individual poems “In Exile, after Frances Jammes” “Living in a Woman, after Henri Michaux,” and “The Contracts, after St.-John Perse”. And “Making the Circle’s Figure: Five French Poems” does the same with Jules Supervielle, Robert Desnos, Jacques Dupin, Yves Bonnefoy, and Andre du Bouchet, offering several poems written in the styles of these other poets. And it also serves to remind me how much more knowledgeable about literature and everything in general Peter Straub is than me. As I said in my FLOATING DRAGON review, he really makes me question just what the hell I’ve been doing with my life. Seeing Peter Straub work doesn’t make me want to be a more successful writer, just a better one. He makes me want to stop flying by the seat of my pants and actually study the craft and its history. Which really sucks because studying the craft is exactly what I thought I’d been doing for the last 20 years. But reading LEESON PARK AND BELSIZE SQUARE just makes me think, Wow I really don’t know anything about writing.

I won’t go into the individual poems in this review, there isn’t room and I’d never do them justice. Instead I’ll just talk about the collection as a whole and how much I enjoyed immersing myself in Straub’s words, where the skill shines through with every phrase and choice.

“Lila, Montauk is grieving into fall:
there are small grey houses stacked like pine

and inside them, shadows
of women dropping off their clothes like leaves.
I will probably never return to the Midwest.”

The more I read of Straub’s work, the more I come to understand why it is he hasn’t achieved the stratospheric level of superstardom King has. God knows I respect the hell out of Stephen King and what he’s achieved, but his prose is definitely for the masses. Straub’s however . . . I hate to say it, but I think he’s just too smart, too good for a lot of readers. Me included, honestly. I can learn so much about writing from reading his work, but if I approached it only as a reader, I don’t know that I’d make it very far. His work demands a little give and take from the reader, there’s a certain amount of time and attention you have to give to the work in order to get out of it everything he’s put in. I don’t know a lot of readers willing to do that, unfortunately. And that is totally our fault, not his.


More Straub
Julia
If You Could See Me Now
Under Venus
Floating Dragon
The Throat
The Hellfire Club
The Green Woman

Recommended: Yes