Richard Lopez' Grapevine

I didn't mean to do it. I didn't want to read this chapbook yet.

I pulled up a chair, the deck starting to give up its shade, hot coffee at hand, to write (to work on more poems from Creely & Rand's Drawn & Quartered). I leafed through the chap (which fits so snug in hand) to the first poem. I resisted reading.

"No, bad boy! This is the time to write. You can read later."

I read "State of Joy." Hmmm... I snuck a glance at "The Star Theater." I read it, cursing with a smile for giving in to the temptation. I read "Punk Music," remembering my favorite punk bands (I'd add S. F.'s Wounds to Richard's list). I was hooked. I read the whole damn chapbook then, rising sun growing hot on my neck.

Much delight in the twenty-one poems. A cornucopia of detail, the poems show a lot without showing too much; Lopez knows which details resonate. What struck me most was his attention to the unusual, what most of us consider ugly in the urban humanscape. Lopez casts an unjudgemental eye.

These are easy poems, slight even -- most of them you know through and through on first reading -- yet they insist, they persist, they stick in the mind. They latched on to my memories of Oakland, of central California Redding to Fresno. By the end, without one whiff of guilt, I immensely enjoyed my morning with Richard's poems.

If I may, I'll include two of the poems. The first, "Hard Core," among other things, describes one of Tom Beckett's alter egos (it's that coonskin hat) on the streets of hollow Hollywood.

Hard Core

Fade in: Hollywood. On Sunset Blvd.
Beneath The Planet of the Apes (ca. 2001) poster
a man squelches the dissonance in his head

with some Mad Dog 20/20.
Beside him his mutt stretched out in
a spastic dream.

There are others like him, here
on this street,
but for some reason, some say it's that certain style

of clothes, maybe it's the coonskin hat,
the long, really long, red beard,
or his claim of a grubstake north of here,

they call him Miner,
one more
cast in the film of presence.

The second, "Poetics," is one of the poems that doesn't "give up" all its meaning on first read, a poem worth returning to again and again.

Poetics

so what if that plate fell from the mantel
and broke into several jagged bits
-- if sweeping up the pieces
one fat chunk punctured the heel of your bare foot

and you limped from the living room to the bathroom
to bandage the wound
forgetting to clean the thin line of blood
now oxidizing to rust

I say send for this chaplet:
24th street irregular press
1008 24th street
sacramento, CA 95816
[email protected]