By Nicole Yurcaba

August Kleinzahler’s “A History of Western Music” will be a special treat for poetry readers who also appreciate music in all its forms and genres.

A History of Western Music by August Kleinzahler, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 96 pages, $17.

August Kleinzahler’s A History of Western Music scrutinizes the liminal spaces where music shakes up everyday life.  Musicians like Whitney Houston and places like Rue Duluth have shaped the speaker more profoundly during trivial moments then they had initially realized. Looked at in hindsight, songs from bands like the Eurythmics embody  summer nostalgia and the blues become the soundtrack for routine business at a delicatessen. The result is that Kleinzahler’s verses, filled with relaxed philosophical pondering, spin their own refreshed variations on ballads and jazz riffs.

The quiet beauty of Kleinzahler’s collection is that it celebrates music in the least considered places, like grocery store aisles. In the collection’s first poem “Chapter 63 (Whitney Houston),” the grocery store aisle are not forgettable, trivial places; they are where “these power ballads” follow “you and the women with their shopping carts filled with eggs.” Hearing that one special song transports an individual back to one of the most meaningful moments of their life, leaving one “about to weep among the avocados and citrus fruits.” The experience in the supermarket becomes nearly orgasmic: the speaker is left “breathing all funny” and “nearly paralyzed.” This particular poem might remind readers of the videos posted by Instagrammer Nick Harrison (known on Instagram as mrprofessor318) whose “When Your Jam Comes on at the Grocery Store” video has earned 217,000 likes.

Other poems like “Chapter 74 (Eurythmics)” interweave nostalgic memories with philosophical narratives. Automobile lovers will relish a brief reference to the Citroen C4 Aircross Picasso in the poem’s initial lines, which establishes a this-one-is-for-the-road tone. Lines like “I mean, how different is this from the last time” call back to the past. Nonetheless, the verse celebrates more than the joy of an unnamed Eurythmics song or even the band itself. Like an old polaroid, it crystalizes moments when underground restaurants and cobbled steps were locations for naive discoveries of youth. The poem also questions our yearning to relive the past—“Does anyone need to see that again?” — and it concludes by affirming the value of life’s redundancy — “These drives to the airport are all the same, no matter what town you’re in.”

“Chapter 77 (30, Rue Duluth)” taps memory and place in order to dramatize an arresting moment in music and cultural history — Elvis Presley’s death. The poem’s opening is sensationally delicious: the news of Elvis’s demise emerges from a radio placed behind “a fresh-baked loaf of bread / and broken link of kolbasz.” Food and music are fused through memory but it doesn’t hold; the speaker briefly disassociates from the news about Elvis in a manner that is quite startling:

I read that piece of meat as if I were Chaim Soutine,

with its capillaries and tiny kernels of fat

bound up in its burnt-sienna casing.

The lengthened lines reflect the speaker’s disassociation. The description of a deceased Elvis innocently mirrors the speaker’s description of the kolbasz:

Captive, a prisoner nearl, inside the ochre room,

as the radio poured forth this terrible news:

–KING ELVIS IS DEAD

his flesh empurpled, the giant gold medallion,

his lolling tongue bitten nearly in two.

These lines act as a significant turning point in the poem, because as it moves towards its conclusion, the speaker’s gossip about Elvis’s death drift toward the comical. We are told that Elvis “existed on Tuinal and cheddar” and that “the fat around his neck” was “like a collar of boudin blanc.” Other rock-and-roll myths, such as Elvis soiling himself onstage — “and only, it turns out, in Vegas and while onstage” — appear in the poem. In a dark-humored moment, the speaker quips, “Now, that’s what I call a showman.” The speaker ends with Elvis’s death and returns to the deli scene: the “soup thickened on the stove” and “The radio resumed its regular programming.” Ironically, the speaker’s return to these soft, regular life patterns end up smoothing over Elvis’s death with a dreamlike, almost surreal, reassurance.

“Chapter 9 (Blue at 4 PM)” is one of the collection’s more Romantic poems. Minimal, structurally and linguistically, the poem incorporates natural imagery into a flow that is as lyrical as one of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet licks. The speaker uses words like “burnish” to describe “late afternoons / as winter ends—.” “Sadness” is a “jagged” emotion “coming on in waves.” The lines ebb and flow, from long to short, mimicking the movement of the waves and then kicking up jagged spurts of sadness.  The image of a trumpeter closes the poem: it “sharks / through cloud and paradise shoal, nosing.” The line’s utilization of “sharks” as a verb transforms the rest of the poem: “Sharks” appears as its own line, acting as a pivotal shift (or bite?). From this point on, the lines once again lengthen and shorten, mimicking not only the aforementioned waves or the trumpeter’s music, but jigjag motion of the hunter fish.

Kleinzahler’s A History of Western Music will be a special treat for poetry readers who also appreciate music in all its forms and genres. The poems in this collection probe the power of music, exploring the psychological and emotional realms it occupies in our life. They are also introspective narratives that dramatize just how deeply cultural influences impact human behavior, steer the directions our self-awareness takes. They rise above the opportunistic superficiality that is embraced by too many contemporary writers when they allude to pop culture. At their best, the poems here take readers on a deeply profound journey with a soul-stirring  soundtrack.

 Nicole Yurcaba (Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Seneca Review, New Eastern Europe, and Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press, Lit Gazeta, Chytomo, Bukvoid, and The New Voice of Ukraine. She also serves as a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and Southern Review of Books.