Book: Love Song With Motor Vehicles
Written By Alan Michael Parker (Boa Editions, Ltd.)
Reviewed by Erick Mertz

---

Picture a man standing, arms spread out as far as his small frame allows. He breathes deep, stretches and waits. Then, in a mad dance bent on acquisition, he begins plucking everything - flying insects, stray newspapers and dandelion seeds, before falling into a heap and questioning their relationships in his hands.

A book of poems such as Love Song with Motor Vehicles does just that, in a sense - as much as a bound collection of pages can stand, spread and break into a spontaneous dance. Bees and brooms and dog-eared treatises condense in the back private seat of a roadside diner where poet Michael Alan Parker's strangely delightful vision is birthed

Parker makes the most salient points where his humorous and philosophical strains unite. A poem like "The Island" takes a quite literal catalog of tactile moments, events and things and mixes them with quotes from Wittgenstein. It is humorous. A type of layman musing comes in improbable, yet relatable venues: "Reading Wittgenstein in a barbecue joint / In what sense are my sensations private? / I move the saltcellar, coffee creamer, / fork and spoon, check, checkmate." Reading Parker questions the assumption that the person next to you on the bus is merely reading - that their exasperations are of the merely physical variety.

Uncertainty is ripe in Parker's voice and it is the seed of some truly excellent writing. Rather than answer when only half sure, he offers little snippets of possibility; sticks of sweet chewing gum to the ravenous. "My Reed Flute, My Grass Sack" is a fortune cookie for tired, sack eyed urbanites. So sublimely peaceful is the line from the book's title poem: "There are leaves in your hair: / I like them there," that one can't help but slide into divine recline.

Perhaps uncertainty is why readers might be left with the impression that Love Song with Motor Vehicles lacks a definitive, cohesive poem. Its title work isn't singular - not the corral that gathers the others and gives them identity and with its end comes an incomplete sense of where you've been. This can be disjointing - we all like some measure of closure - but the denial of that courtesy just may be Parker's device.

© 2003 - Erick Mertz