"['Listening to Coltrane'] sets the tone, even the range of the book: the impassioned search for beauty in our lives should be absolutely non-negotiable, but the search is inextricably tangled up in (or sublimated by) the fight for justice in this, our “cosmic exile.” The poem captures – or intimates – the haunting beauty of Coltrane because it casts the music in our history, which is where we actually hear it . . .
There’s more than one tour de force in this collection. In “Babble,” Scully visits his ancient mother Hazel in a nursing home. She is impossibly old: “crouched at the edge of the bed/ like a feral animal// 3 pocketbooks on one arm, crumbs scattered.” Hazel, a feisty former factory worker, is now shriveled and trapped not just in the home, but in the cage of old age. The pathetic scene of Hazel babbling– thinking she’s at the factory or a party, trying to escape by waving a five dollar bill – becomes all of us. We have all lost our way in this system “waving the worthless flag/ the worthless money/ of words that lost their meaning,/ looking for a ride home.”
The title poem looks closely at Donatello’s sculpture of David – a work that captures the young man “nonchalant/ vulnerable/ soft-bodied/ a true killer” in his Biblical triumph over Goliath. Typical of Scully’s other poems, this challenging piece makes us re-see: “Poor David/the good guy// victory is the worst thing/ that could befall him// in the glass of his great victory, through the loathsome mist/ of world weariness// he sees himself/ becoming King David.” This David goes on to become a ruthless ruler “eating flesh by the fistful// choking on shadows// in the improbable blood/of his great victory// he sees all this/ and is famished”. If we have viewed David from the vantage point of the iconoclast before, we still may have missed what this poem brings to the surface: how terrible “victory” can be, how easily the oppressed becomes the insatiable oppressor, as did this king of Israel. The mythic frozen moment becomes palpable and present-tense in the poem: this is a story of power playing out right in front of us in the Middle East where Imperial aggression is a “war of liberation.”
[These] poems push the boundaries of what we commonly believe that poems can or even ought to do – they are political and visceral. They are philosophical without being merely ponderous. They revive Marx’s old adage about philosophers and apply it to poets and citizens alike – that our job is not just to describe the world, but to change it."--Jon Andersen, The Cafe Review
