Review: The Logic of Pink (A Review of American Upanishads by G.R. Tomaini)

By Peter Mladinic

 

The word Upanishad comes from ancient India. In his book American Upanishads, G.R. Tomaini forges connections between Eastern and Western thought, integrating ideas from Eastern into his own empirical experiences and observations. The result is a collection of poems as vibrant as they are original. Throughout Tomaini references works of art from Degas’ dancers to Faberge’s eggs, drawing on references from poems by W. B. Years, W.C. Williams, Sylvia Plath, and Edna St. Vincent Millay; also, references to Shakespeare’s Othello, and Romeo and Juliet. Tomaini’s “language bridges” are crafted with lyricism, sensuality, and intuition. 

      Part of the lyricism lies in the poems’ free verse forms. The forms, integral to the meanings of the poems, sometimes consist of a dialogue, as between self and soul in early poems of Yeats which drew on ancient Eastern wisdom. In “Crystalline Ballet Dancers, Three” one speaker says, in line four “I love you” and from the end of that line, into the fifth, the other asks, “ …so/ why did you take a hammer…” The language is compressed, with the answer paradoxically given, by the first speaker, “Because…obviously,/ you loved me…?” Similarly, a dialogue between Desdemona and Iago comprises the form in “Desdemona’s Secret,” and in “Childbirth,” between Romeo and Juliet. Also, lyricism is achieved by repetitions that, in “My Real Friends” evoke a chant:

 

                                            alcohol will be my friend, but

                                            will

                                            you? If I join the military, I’ll

                                            have

                                            a band of brothers, but would 

                                            you

                                            be my sibling ?

 

End rhymes, internal rhymes and other sound devices contribute to the poems’ lyricism, their approximations to song.

      Rooted in the spiritual, these poems, in their exacting imagery, celebrate the sensual. 

In “El Diablo On The Runway,” the human body is celebrated. “Move those hips / shake that ass!” The spiritual is fused with the sensual in “Berries For Dessert:”

 

                                           Naked before the head chief:

                                           berries are weighted by the man—

                                           as Osiris might weigh hearts

                                           outside the gates of Heaven

 

In “Blame It On My Big Dick” the tactile and the audial join with the visual in “Angel’s Tears / And Moonlit / Howls / Stifled Lives And Raw Hot Pink / Bowels!” And “Two Voluptuous Breasts” is a humorous revitalization of the anthologized William's poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.” 

      Tomaini’s intuition, based on imagination, irony, irreverence, and wordplay, affords the freedom needed to create. The speaker’s cell phone dies “too soon for the / priest to get to / it in time to give / it its last rites” In “Spider Real Estate” the spider is shown a corner in which it might live, then “a car mirror,” and lastly “a basement.” The humor is satirical in that the speaker recommends the middle image, the car mirror, since the speaker-agent’s client is “a middle-class spider.”  Intuition, the poet’s innate sense of knowing where to go, is significant in “Miss Betsy On Her Bench,” an observation of a young woman sitting on a bench in a park.

 

                                                all saw Miss Betsy there in peace,

                                                but her Mona Lisa face  — bland

                                                 ,

                                                expressionless — hinted not at 

                                                her

                                                true reality : inner oceans of pain

                                                ,

                                                entire universes full of hatred ;

                                                no,

                                                none could see young Bess as a 

                                                pot

                                                in which volcanoes full of fire and

                                                passion brewed

 

Betsy is in the garden, and the garden is in her; however, the flowers and her tranquility are transposed to “volcanoes full of fire and passion. Both the outer person (peaceful) and the inner (restless) are extensions of the speaker as a whole, the speaker’s exterior and interior being. And Betsy, the poet’s creation, like the flowers near the bench, is born partly from the poet’s intuition.

     One disadvantage of a review is that while it can tell some it cannot tell all. American Upanishads is very much a work of the imagination, as inclusive of its readers as it is paradoxically reverent and irreverent. It’s ultimately about living life to the fullest, an invocation to the gods of freedom, a book in which “hatchlings swirl in a gyre with mirth.”

 

 

 

 

 

Peter Mladinic's most recent book of poems, Maiden Rock, is available from UnCollected Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.