This review appears in vol. 63, no. 1, fall, 2023, pp. 54-6.
FOOLISH VIRTUOSITY
William Trowbridge. Call Me Fool. Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, 2022. $17.95, paper.
William Trowbridge has demonstrated virtuosic invention and a mastery of form and content across eight previous collections and a tonal palette ranging from the piercingly serious to the wildly humorous. In the process he has garnered much applause and many honors.
He is one of this country’s finest poetic realists, bringing superb observational skills to vernacular American life: its unrelenting commercialism, multiform pop culture, and tumultuous speech. He can shiver a reader’s timbers unerringly, as in his unforgettable earlier poems about his father being in combat in World War II or his own work as a teenager in a Cudahy meatpacking plant.
Yet he can turn as unerringly to mythopoeic invention, as he does in Call Me Fool, his taut, electric, deliciously funny new book, where he reveals again a trademark ability to work unflinchingly in front of massive backdrops (the Bible, Milton, Shakespeare, Melville, etc.), an unwavering humanity, and an ability to puncture cubic miles of vanity and pomposity. In this mode his work can remind one of what Twain and Byron achieved in similar territory, or, for that matter, what Blake explored and realized in his own capacious mythmaking about heaven and hell. These qualities leap freshly from the title of the new volume to its closing words. Trowbridge has written brilliantly about Fool before: see Ship of Fool (Red Hen Press, 2011). Let him do it again? Why not just walk out to the mound and hand Satchel Paige another baseball?
In the earlier Ship of Fool the title character was given the first and third sections of a three-part book, so that the interval of the second section, which consisted of more realistic and tonally varied work, set up a kind of interlude which, to a degree, drew temporary attention (beautifully) away from the Fool poems. Now, Call Me Fool has no sectional divisions, and the forty-two poems that follow its introductory proem are third-person ultra-brief narratives about Fool, none reaching two full pages and more than half ending on a single page. Given Trowbridge’s unflagging invention, intensity, and precision, the reader is invited to a feast…
Continued in vol. 63, no. 1, fall, 2023, pp. 54-6.