The Calculus
of Falling Bodies: Poems
978-1-60940-419-2
80 pages, $16.00
Geoff Rips is a writer’s writer. He is a novelist, a
journalist, speech writer, grant writer, script writer and, now, with the publication
of The Calculus of Falling Bodies, we
are presented with his first poetry collection. Inspired by nature, work and politics, and
with his family as his muse, it is a fine debut.
Many of his narrative poems juxtapose the workings of nature
and his growing girls, as in “Wetlands” in which he and one of his daughters
are at the Gulf, bird-watching: “as I stand, landlocked, watching my daughter
watch the pelican, / then leaping herself, jeté
on the jetty, / then again, arms thrust to the skies, then again / and she’s
gone.” There is a good deal of anxiety in these poems – all things pass,
even good things. How to hold on? Rips implores someone to tell him how. This
is his “Appeal”:
The kids in
bed. I make my rounds. Front door.
One child, a
still life between two stuffed bears.
Mail on the
table. Tell me. The other,
covers thrown
off, frozen in full gait. Running.
Back door.
Can something new come of this?
Tell me. The
house is dark. The cat climbs a screen.
I sit on the
couch listening. Can I hear you sleeping
in our bed? Tell
me. The house shifts.
If I stand too quickly, will all this slide away?
In the “Personal Geography” section, Rips shifts gears with darkly
humorous odes (one features cockroaches) and laments to New York City where he
seems to be homesick and decides “We fall into the way we live.” This is “Looking
For Work”:
Today I feel
like someone
who is
capable of doing something.
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| Geoff Rips |
Soon they’ll
grab me and say,
“All the
decisions are ours.”
But today I
feel capable of anything,
capable of rejecting
myself,
capable of
lying in the street,
capable of digging my own grave.
The dignity of work and people are important to Rips (see
his introduction to himself at the beginning of the book) and the political
life of the nation appalls him. In “Dreams”: “The subconscious of America is paper
thin. / Our anorexic inner life. / We’re standing in the creek of this nation’s
sins and the water’s rising, / …"The world is complex. Not what the crowd at
Hooter’s / wants to hear.” Or this, from “War is a Cure for Loneliness”: “Meaning
is a cure for loneliness. Nations are lonely. / War has meaning. Until it no
longer does.”
The concluding, eponymous, section is concerned with loss,
with mortality, where we insist on ourselves, asserting ourselves to the
general disregard of the cosmos. Rarely, we get a brief reprieve. My favorite, “At
51,” in its entirety:
I’m glad my
losses are gradual.
We outlive
all our joys. But
just now I’ve
been dancing on the front porch
with my
beautiful daughters as they gyrate
down the
uncut trails of their green lives.
Even the
setting sun seems to pause
before it drops.
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