|
Critical Praise An intimate and moving book by a master stylist. Farber’s words sear though the page, wounding and healing at the same time. Somewhere in that infinite space between poetry and prose sits this latest (always asking itself if it's the last) work by the iconoclastic, inestimable Thomas Farber. Weaving together memory and memorials, a clear-eyed view of what it means to face an end (the end?), and Farber's wide-ranging and discursive understanding of friendship, ambition, work, and love in all their many complexities, PENULTIMATES is a lively, empathetic, funny, and above all searingly compassionate view of the world as Farber has lived and loved it. This is a book about death. It is also a book about surfing. It is a poem. It is also prose, or whatever you want to call it. Mostly, it is a Book of Wisdom in the ancient sense of the term, like what Hesiod or Lao Tzu might have written had they lived into the 21st century, and been possessed of a wicked sense of humor, a vast arsenal of kick-ass quotes, and an indefatigable love of life that bubbles up through every sadness and disappointment. In Penultimates, Thomas Farber gives us what we need most: a rich, funny, and searching meditation about questions facing us at the end: How to live, how to die, what does it mean? Refracted through a range of artists and thinkers including Joni Mitchell, the Buddha, Hemingway, Freud, Richard Posner, Leonard Cohen (and Sylvester Stallone !), this is the literary companion we crave, even if we can’t yet admit it to ourselves. A guide we deserve for the passage awaiting us all. Riffs, Rants, and Wry Humor: A Review of Penultimates: The Now & the Not-Yet, by Thomas Farber Review by Aline Soules in The Compulsive Reader Open the book and the reader is given quotes by Mark Strand, Townes Van Zandt, and Peter Schjeldahl. What they have in common is death, both as a subject and as a fact because Farber lists the birth and death dates of all three authors. Farber gives all dead persons quoted in these eclectic riffs birth and death dates, a constant reminder of the end. There is also an Author’s Note, in which he tells the reader that when he started to write after his last publication in 2021, “one impulse was to avoid…The Denial of Death.” He goes on to write, “As for what ensued…” followed by a wide list of thoughts from “Glimpses” through “Qualms” and “Exasperations” and “Tokes of malice” to “Savorings.” He asks, “Death at least acknowledged, was death not denied? / Fair question.” He ends with Ecclesiastes: “to every thing there is a season…” The conversational tone, creating intimate connection with the reader, carries through the book as he muses about death and near-death. The reader is plunged into a cacophony of thoughts piling up on each other. In “An Effort to Get Doomscrolling Out of My System,” Farber bombards the reader with subjects, yawing from one to the other in staccato delivery, for example, this section from the middle of the piece:
Farber rarely lets the reader take a breath through the entire collection. Whether he’s starting his explorations with “Re William Blake (1757-1827)” or “Neighbors” or “School Days,” there’s every chance he’ll segue to another seemingly unrelated topic, although he generally connects them in the end. For example, in “Die Already!” he lambasts the U.S., beginning:
He then references a Washington Post story about Chad Carswell, a man with kidney disease who was turned down by the hospital for a transplant because his chances of survival were lower as an anti-vaxxer. Carswell was so adamant, he said he’d “see you on the other side” rather than get the shot, insisting on “standing up for our rights.” For him, this was about choice and freedom. Farber then quotes Huey Long (1893-1935), the New Hampshire state motto, and Patrick Henry (1736-1799) on the subject of freedom or death. He ends: “You want it? Shit, man, you got it!” The next piece is “Portent,” and the reader is whipped to “The tropics” to walk the beach, check the crabs, surf, pick up beach trash, riff on a middle-aged guy in “superb shape,” and consider Jack “in his seventies,” “happy Democrats in a one-party town,” and how Ray died in Vegas. But Ray had been partying “pretty hard,” which Farber calls “A compensatory gift…allowing us to put some distance between Ray’s heart attack and our present—and anticipated—conditions.” From there, everyone goes on with living “and/or, to paraphrase Mark Strand, go on with our dying.” The tone of these poems, the wry humor, and the irony keep the reader reading. Farber begins “Meant to Be”:
He then gives the reader details about Dr. Wayne Dyer (1940-2015) who wrote
The next section is Dyer’s view of himself, how he was conceived on the day that Hitler [1899-1945] invaded Poland, born the day the Nazis invaded the low countries, and saw the Holocaust coming. When Dyer died, “he left his body, returning to Infinite Source to embark on his next adventure.” Farber ends with “No need, then, to add R.I.P.” His last piece, “Homecomings,” begins “Safe ’n sound. Everything in its place in the cottage…” We sense his wistfulness when he writes: “The continuum continuing. Couldn’t this just go on and on?” He then offers a list of sixteen “things and moments,” wildly different, from the first—“End-of-summer white peaches!—to his “musician-wife, reunited with her piano.” He muses on what will happen to her after he’s gone, what she’ll do, and returns to the quote, “To every thing there is a season,” adding “But not to insist that things end.” He references a “past life in nineteenth-century China,” laughs at the thought, “but then again who’s to say?” He ends with a riff on the “fate of the universe(s)—Big Crunch, Big Freeze, Big Rip, Heat Death, Vacuum Decay?” He promises: “I’ll try—like Hell!—to let you know from The Other Side. If, that is, there are Sides.” He offers an “Afterword” in which he wonders, “If there’s another book ‘in me’ as they used to say, Ultimates (!) will no doubt include pages of amends.” After the breathtaking ride through Penultimates, let’s hope there is another opportunity for readers to enjoy another work by this irrepressible author. Aline Soules’ work has appeared in such publications as the Kenyon Review, Houston Literary Review, Poetry Midwest, Galway Review, and Flash Fiction Magazine. Her book reviews have been published by Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review, and others. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Online: https://alinesoules.com |