Blue Alleys

by Paul Christensen

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 096278446X
• ISBN13: 9780962784460
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: Stone River Press
• Length: 84 Pages
• Weight: 0.99 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A Master of the Image

Paul Christensen's Blue Alleys highlights every aspect of humanity, from adolescents to death, which resonates a universal perceptiveness with clarity that lacks sentimentality. On the other hand, Christensen never looses sight of the personal journey to clarity by invoking locations of spatial identity that breathes life into still bones with terse images. The delicate balance between the universal and the personal conjures up the two words of the title itself that echo throughout these prose poems, in which life itself is communally separate. These shared spaces, as the alleys themselves are locus between abodes or people, skips the surface facades to delve into uncharted interior depths of the narrow pathways that leads to backdoors littered with all that we hide. Among the wonderful thirty-nine poems that embraces lost loves and missed communions with nature, I've chosen "Pencils," "The Way," "The Unexpected Caller" and "Prairies" to discuss here as personal favorites. Whereas in "Pencils," the memories of a grandfather's life of wonder exists because of his drawing capabilities of ammunition shells that led him to France during WWI, but at the same time, these pencils exude his love to his family and continue to tell his story long after his death in the hands of his grandson. In "The Way," the ever-impending death becomes a seemly simple street scene while stopped for a red traffic light. The narrator, removed by the interior of the car waits to move forward in life, watches a man beaten by others as a reminder of the fragility of Darwinian nature. The poem's power lies not only in the brutal scene but also in the narrator's commissary with the downtrodden man as providing uplifting braveness to the final moments of life, death, which allows the narrator to continue with life less fearful. The strength of the "The Unexpected Caller" comes from the connection between the second person narrator's imagination of who the caller might be and the body gestures of the caller's embarrassment for bothering the narrator, leaving the reader with the normality of an unresolved loneliness. In "Prairies," Christensen again invokes a second person narrator who fails to understand the essence of beauty in the stark prairie landscape. The meditative countenance between nature and humanity shows the connective loss as being a gulf unbridgeable now, yet Christensen's language becomes a stopgap itself that leads the reader into the supposed wasteland with senses unsheathed. Paul Christensen's Blue Alleys is a tightly knit poetic oeuvre that dazzles the senses with chiseled images set upon a pedestal of human nature commonality.