This review appears in the Spring, 2024 issue, no. 51, pp. 223-7.
To Move Wild Laughter
Near the end Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost, the
heroine, Rosaline, tells her suitor Berowne that, to win her hand, his task for a year, is
With all the fierce endeavor of [his] wit, To enforce the painèd impotent to smile.
Berowne, incredulous, replies:
To move wild laughter in the throat of death?
It cannot be, it is impossible.
Mirth cannot move a soul in agony
William Trowbridge has no such doubts about the powers of mirth. With finely stropped wit, this is exactly the goal he sets for himself in Call Me Fool, his latest and profoundly mirth-filled collection.
There may have been a time in poetry circles when readers new to Trowbridge may have thought he was one of the “World’s Best Kept Secret [s],” the title of the book’s closing poem. But certainly not so in recent years, as a steady output of edgy and hilarious books have proven him to be a worthy rival of such comic fixtures as Albert Goldbarth, Denise Duhamel, Stephen Dobyns, Tony Hoagland, and Billy Collins.
In this follow-up to his well-received 2011 collection Ship of Fool, Trowbridge returns to the archetypal Fool figure, a classic schlemiel, who, with his hapless bumbling, indeed moves us to laughter. In this follow-up, we are provided with another encyclopedic gallop through time, space, and place, from the Biblical creation to the present, from Heaven to Hell and back.
Review continued in the Spring, 2024 issue, no. 51, pp. 223-7.