A spattering of short, desperate tales, these poems scatter imagery like bits of glass shattered by a bullet. And there’s a lot of bullets here. Most of the poems start off in bars; almost as many end with someone dead. One starts off with someone dead: “The midnight wind carried/the growing smell of Murphy/to the crows/gathering on the wire fence/in the impartial moonlight.” There are places where these poems are like bad detective stories, with hotel desk clerks reading racing forms, over-40-year-old women seducing rich bankers, junkies blowing on dice in backroom gambling parlours. There’s no real surprises in terms of plot here. A hitman makes a deal with a guy in a bar, waits in a dumpster one night, hits his victim a bunch of times with a crowbar, then throws him into a bodybag in the trunk of his car. The only thing that threatens to save these poems is the odd interesting turn of phrase: “Mr. Whitey wrote a figure on his beer-mat,/slid it across to Vincent./It shook hands with Vincent’s needs.” There’s a couple of poems near the end of the book that have nothing to do with gangsters, cleavage, guns, drunks or hopelessness, and these are the strongest. What I’m left with, overwhelmingly, after reading these poems is a sense that Bakowski is making all this up. I’m not talking about the stories themselves, but the way Bakowski’s heart fails to engage his characters in anything that sounds like emotional honesty.
Chap-book / 28 pages / Publisher: Oel Press / Main Creator: Peter Bakowski / $? / 88 Dagmar Ave., Toronto, ON, M4M 1W1