If You Have Ghosts

by John Pursley III

Poetry. "Graceful, tensile, and electric, IF YOU HAVE GHOSTS is a haunting and haunted book. John Pursley III's prodigious gifts for metaphor, imagery, and an elliptical narrative reminiscent of Larry Levis are amply displayed in this guide through liquid time. We encounter a fire that 'sounded like my mother snapping sheets / Onto the bed as they came out of the dryer,' Chet Baker's 'androgynous melody' that is 'like the false-front store / that never closes, & fools no one,' a lollipop dropped by a child in an airport that explodes 'in a confusion of ruby shards.' Empathetically felt, played out in a deeply nuanced syntax, these poems both reveal and complicate our troubled, troubling world"--Beth Ann Fennelly.

Genres: Poetry

70 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Matt]

John's a friend of mine, and I really like his poems-- this is the kind of comment that some people will no doubt mind off-putting, but fuck them: John's poems are the spaces in which John thinks, and I really like that. Though these are poems about life in the South, or at least a lot of them are, and they are poems that are in fact steeped in the sensual pleasures of heat and food and all that, they are also interested in a real way with history, with heritage, with what we remember and what we forget, and what it all means.

And that's why I think of these as primarily thoughtful, or maybe it's more accurate to say, as thinking poems. They are poems of accumulation, as if John is adding something new, like some sort of Jenga game in verse, with each of his characteristic staggered two line stanzas, and like Jenga, those additions are tests, John's way of seeing if the prevailing idea or conception he's been using in the poem can sustain that.... It's not as if these are high-wire poems, because John's more of an architect than that, more of a planner. But there are flights in here that might still make you dizzy, when you look out the metaphorical window and see where you are. The poems themselves, maybe a little strangely, never seem to have that doubt of their own solidity, maybe because that particular tension is already worked out?

The last section is about John's dad, which I'm sure lacks the kind of descriptive verve I've had up till now! But that's mostly a statement for me; it's a weird notion, and one I had to keep reminding myself of when I read the poems, because John as a speaker here seems so sui generis that it's weird for him to even have a dad.

Good stuff, a book I've very glad to own, and one I anticipate picking up again and reading around more in.

[Jonathan]

"If you have ghosts" is a bit of a difficult work to give a critique on, if only because it has to be judged on a few different merits. Pursley, it cannot be denied, has an excellent sense of language; his ability to paint with words and sculpt a vision is obvious; the problem is: despite the motion in these images, save a few sparse poems in this collection - the poetry never actually goes anywhere. To be plain: There is a lot of flash when it comes into the collective body, and very little substance when you get into actually reading through the book. Despite this, there are some gems between the pages that it is worth the time taken to ferret out.