Pleasant Street: A Chapbook of Baby Boomer Ballads & Poems
POETRY AT THE GRANGE HALL SUPPER, BEEF AND BISCUITS ...
by David Moreau, OFF THE COAST, May 2006
If Tom Lyford's book, Pleasant Street, was food it would not be a fancy restaurant meal, paella with saffron, or something like that. It's more like a casserole for a grange hall supper. But it's a good one, home-made with real butter and herbs from the garden.
Described as "a chapbook of baby boomer ballads and poems," Pleasant Street tells the story of Lyford growing up in the fifties in Dover-Foxcroft. Its poems are about such things as playing marbles in the school yard, rummage sale Saturdays, lusting after the girl wearing only high heel majorette boots and a three foot high pack of Old Golds (costume) in the TV commercial, and getting sick from sneaking sips from the boss's pint of Jim Beam when working alone at Cole's Esso. The writing is lively. In the poem "Good Ol' Boys'" he describes riding his bike
...engined by the ace of spades
clothespinned right into the spokes
whacketty-whackettywhack
Lyford skips words as quickly as a playground jumprope. In "Jumping Into Spring," he describes
two girls
two rising and falling
playground pistons
flouncing pigtails & ponytails
while the chant goes
outgoesthedoctoroutgoesthenurse!
outgoestheladywiththebigfatpurse!
Lyford describes Pleasant Street as a biographical memoir, so we have no problem with identifying the poet as the person in the poems. Maybe he did, or maybe he didn't…
(heist) valve stem caps
off the tires of idling cars out in front of
bob roberts' grocery
but what does it matter? These poems describe the world that Tom Lyford remembers. He is the main character, the star of the show. This could be a danger, except that he is so damn likeable. When he describes the aftermath of eighty-two pound Aunt Sadie slamming the door on his hand,
a shrill squeal piping out of me
like steam from the teakettle left on the stove
me flippin' around like a hooked sunfish
on the bottom of a boat...
then we feel for the guy.
He doesn't claim to be the leader of the pack. And although in "Lament" he writes…
kerouac & ginsberg
& their beat generation
already leaving me behind...
off the road
off the bus
…he is not a complainer. He does not see himself as an outsider, just one of the gang, calling the reader to come along. Who wouldn't want to join in?
The book is interspersed with old photographs of the town, the elementary school, Lyford as a toddler hogging the rhubarb, or as a youngster with a buddy wearing fake nose-and-glasses with bottles of Naragansett King Size lined up in front of them.
And the poems are snapshots as well-- lusting after Wendy and Tinkerbell, delivering newspapers and figuring out how to give vampires a "sunrise surprise." It doesn't try to pretend, fortunately, that those were the good old days and, by comparison, these are the society-gone-to-hell-in-a-handbasket days. It's just stuff we can see and share. Like in "Merrick Square Market: A Travelogue"
& the headlines cry ike! ted williams!
while the philco way in the back beats out
"the ballad of a teenage queen"
& your red ball jets pad reverently
over the oil-darkened hardwood
past the register's ka-ching promise
of a copper indian head showing up in your change...
Like any work of art, there are some things one might not approve of. I found the use of lower case letters for names and titles to be annoying. I read that even e e cummings didn't want to do that, but his publisher insisted. And the use of rhyme and meter in the last poem, "Curmudgeon Blues," comes across as silly, the literary equivalent of putting mini-marshmallows in the lime-green jello mold.
But on the table at the grange hall supper, this book is like a big dish of beef and biscuits. It's just plain good. I heartily recommend digging right in.
by David Moreau, OFF THE COAST, May 2006
If Tom Lyford's book, Pleasant Street, was food it would not be a fancy restaurant meal, paella with saffron, or something like that. It's more like a casserole for a grange hall supper. But it's a good one, home-made with real butter and herbs from the garden.
Described as "a chapbook of baby boomer ballads and poems," Pleasant Street tells the story of Lyford growing up in the fifties in Dover-Foxcroft. Its poems are about such things as playing marbles in the school yard, rummage sale Saturdays, lusting after the girl wearing only high heel majorette boots and a three foot high pack of Old Golds (costume) in the TV commercial, and getting sick from sneaking sips from the boss's pint of Jim Beam when working alone at Cole's Esso. The writing is lively. In the poem "Good Ol' Boys'" he describes riding his bike
...engined by the ace of spades
clothespinned right into the spokes
whacketty-whackettywhack
Lyford skips words as quickly as a playground jumprope. In "Jumping Into Spring," he describes
two girls
two rising and falling
playground pistons
flouncing pigtails & ponytails
while the chant goes
outgoesthedoctoroutgoesthenurse!
outgoestheladywiththebigfatpurse!
Lyford describes Pleasant Street as a biographical memoir, so we have no problem with identifying the poet as the person in the poems. Maybe he did, or maybe he didn't…
(heist) valve stem caps
off the tires of idling cars out in front of
bob roberts' grocery
but what does it matter? These poems describe the world that Tom Lyford remembers. He is the main character, the star of the show. This could be a danger, except that he is so damn likeable. When he describes the aftermath of eighty-two pound Aunt Sadie slamming the door on his hand,
a shrill squeal piping out of me
like steam from the teakettle left on the stove
me flippin' around like a hooked sunfish
on the bottom of a boat...
then we feel for the guy.
He doesn't claim to be the leader of the pack. And although in "Lament" he writes…
kerouac & ginsberg
& their beat generation
already leaving me behind...
off the road
off the bus
…he is not a complainer. He does not see himself as an outsider, just one of the gang, calling the reader to come along. Who wouldn't want to join in?
The book is interspersed with old photographs of the town, the elementary school, Lyford as a toddler hogging the rhubarb, or as a youngster with a buddy wearing fake nose-and-glasses with bottles of Naragansett King Size lined up in front of them.
And the poems are snapshots as well-- lusting after Wendy and Tinkerbell, delivering newspapers and figuring out how to give vampires a "sunrise surprise." It doesn't try to pretend, fortunately, that those were the good old days and, by comparison, these are the society-gone-to-hell-in-a-handbasket days. It's just stuff we can see and share. Like in "Merrick Square Market: A Travelogue"
& the headlines cry ike! ted williams!
while the philco way in the back beats out
"the ballad of a teenage queen"
& your red ball jets pad reverently
over the oil-darkened hardwood
past the register's ka-ching promise
of a copper indian head showing up in your change...
Like any work of art, there are some things one might not approve of. I found the use of lower case letters for names and titles to be annoying. I read that even e e cummings didn't want to do that, but his publisher insisted. And the use of rhyme and meter in the last poem, "Curmudgeon Blues," comes across as silly, the literary equivalent of putting mini-marshmallows in the lime-green jello mold.
But on the table at the grange hall supper, this book is like a big dish of beef and biscuits. It's just plain good. I heartily recommend digging right in.