Entrainment
Ewan Whyte, 48 pgs, Exile Editions, ExileEditions.com, $14.95
Ewan Whyte has followed up his 2004 translation of the poetry of Catullus with this new, short book of original verse from Exile Editions.
The moody poems of Entrainment do offer a few rewarding moments, and Whyte’s balanced lines at times generate engaging wisps of narrative. Whyte works with the tensions between his sometimes mundane subjects — a bike accident, traffic court — and his broader metaphysical and æsthetic concerns. “On a Night Bus,” for example, captures the “stillness of strangers resting side by side / in their seats. / Long after midnight” before showing us the relation of this shared space to memory, to childhood, to “the self-conscious rush to death we all face, / where there for brief moments is no time at all.”
Despite its brief moments of success, this collection is flat at best. Whyte gestures towards big questions and paradoxes, but does not take us anywhere new. Even one of his most entertaining pieces, “Istvan Kantor Takedown (Notes toward an essay in poetry),” reads like versified Kafka: good in its way, darkly funny, but hardly striking for a contemporary reader.
Entrainment is burdened by a superfluity of allusions to history, art, and literature, its tone-deaf portraits of poverty and mental illness (“You are lovely / as always with your thickly / matted red hair, unwashed clothes”), and by its occasional lines that feel like they’re more meant-to-shock than actually shocking. Though the book showcases Whyte’s erudition and his ear for verse, it offers little else. (Andrew Woodrow-Butcher)