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Magician's Hat by Bill Tremblay: Reviewed by Norman Olson
i have now finished reading through Magician's Hat a couple times.... it is truly a fine fine book... i am not much of a reviewer but, if i were to review it, i would give it five out of five stars... first: i love the fact that it is poetry about something besides the poets own ego... so so much contemporary poetry is so excruciatingly confessional that it is painful to read... the biography as you bring it to the reader is an amazing and fascinating look, not only at an interesting historical / or art / historical personage, but at an interesting time and place... well, if properly written about, maybe all times and places are interesting... but the point is, the characters and their world come to life...
you get to know and care about the artist and the people around him and i feel some understanding of the conflicts in a patriot/hero... who has certainly feet of clay... i mean that all people have the capacity for great good and evil... but the equation changes when machine guns and bombs are introduced... it is easy for me to babble on about the plight of the workers... i can do it with the authority of 20 factory years... but, yes, i know those fuckers too and the perfection - selflessness - even plain old decency one would hope for in an uncorrupted proletariat is often enough in short supply....
well, i come away thinking that for me, and yes the ego always has the last word... politics is something i must turn my back on... i am not willing, at least not now at age 65, to determine who is to live and who is to die... and that is a determination one makes by picking up the machine pistol... or being anything other than a pacifist... if the bombs had gone off and killed Trotsky... what then... he died soon enough anyway... and a revolutionary, even a reactionary one, must be ready for that... well, wrestling with the social system... with the creaking machinery of Catholic morality and political and Catholic amorality... there is bound to be a struggle and i think you bring that struggle strongly to life... without providing easy answers... well, i say bravo for raising these tough unanswerable questions...
Secondly... the writing is superb... in a true narrative poem... as in a novel or screenplay, the writing must become invisible and let the story bloom like a flower in the reader's mind... these poems do that with masterful lines and images... the great fiend in the cathedral, for example... yes, i know the image from the painting, but see it in your poem through the painter/revolutionary/mortal protagonist's watering eyes... artistically embryonic... or more accurately, not yet realized... spectral, haunting... scary.... in the jail, in the padded back seat of the 1950s sedan with armed thugs... in the politician or gangster's office... dancing in New York drawing rooms...
well, all i can say is thanks for writing this... it is a fine piece of writing and a magnificent biographical excursion... from battlefield to the barrio to the cathedral, and back again...
Bill Tremblay is an award-winning poet as well as a novelist, teacher, editor, and reviewer whose work has appeared in seven full-length volumes of poetry including Crying in the Cheap Seats [University of Massachusetts Press] The Anarchist Heart [New Rivers Press], Home Front [Lynx House Press], Second Sun: New & Selected Poems [L'Epervier Press], Duhamel: Ideas of Order in Little Canada [BOA Editions Ltd.] , Rainstorm Over the Alphabet [Lynx House Press], and most recently Shooting Script: Door of Fire [Eastern Washington University Press]. Web Site
Norman Olson is a 59 year old poet, artist and civil service worker.
Since publishing his first poem in 1984, after many years of submission and rejection, he has
published hundreds of poems and drawings in 15 countries and all over the USA. He worked
in a factory printing telephone books from 1968 to 1988 and since then has worked at civil service clerical jobs.
Web Site
Email: Norman Olson
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