Chotto: Poems by David Farrah

  

      David Farrah opens his collection, “Chotto,” with a paragraph discussing the flexibility of that Japanese word: “It means a little of something,” but it has, in addition, “chameleon-like qualities” that allow it to “tactfully hedge or suggest or politely request.” It can also “color itself passive aggressive and deferentially resist.”

      This small word is brimming with meaning, and thus can be seen as emblematic of the poems in this book. They too are little things: the longest is twenty-one lines, and many are much shorter. The few lines that make up the poems are short, too: There are a couple of seven-syllable lines because the form of those poems, haiku, demands them, and the odd six-syllable line, but the poems are mostly composed of lines of five syllables or fewer. Like chotto, though, these little poems do a lot.

      See, for example, how in “Event Horizon,” the poem that opens the book, Farrah conjures a cadence from his very few words, a cadence that is accented by the rhymes he artfully places and the master class he gives in the use of assonance and alliteration:

Let us suppose

there really is

a rabbit

at the bottom

of the hat

and every child-

hood is full

of holes. Little

ones that let

in light. Alice

in her bed

at night, play-

time past, watch

unwound, ears

to the ground.

 

It is tempting to believe that a poet would need a bigger stage for verbal fireworks of the kind Farrah employs here. Farrah shows us how wrong that belief would be.

      “Event Horizon” evokes the wonderlands that children can inhabit. In other poems Farrah, without ever sacrificing the verbal and intellectual wit that characterizes his work, elucidates the mundane, as in “6:00 AM”:

It’s then

that I shower

and get dressed

in that

small space

I have been

allotted

in this world

precisely for

nothing more

or less than

that.

 

One of the things that poetry does is to allow us to see again what habit has made invisible. Farrah succeeds in doing that.

      The same focused attention is present in “The Tidal Flat.” The last line of the poem is one word, and it is a word that is unexpected enough that it jolts us awake to a small miracle:

Beneath the clouds

The planet spins.

 

Two birds drop in.

Unhinge.

 

We see those birds.

 

      And then there are the things that are not easy to see or are perhaps un-seeable: dark matter, for example:

Knotty stuff

and stringy

things and

all those

in-betweens.

As worlds

unfurl

black cats

uncurl

a corpus

more unseen.

 

For a poet as interested in the natural world as Farrah is, an interest in physics is almost mandatory, even when the insights that field offers hover just outside the range of comprehension.

      And from physics to horror, for a poet who has lived in Japan, is a short step:

         8:16 AM

The moment at which

the sun could no longer be

unapprehended.

 

A note informs us that this was “the moment at which the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima.”

      The horror is real, and Farrah doesn’t look away. He balances it perfectly throughout, however, with nature, with wonder, and with wit. He manages, that is, to squeeze much of what it is to be human into the small spaces of his poems, the 46 pages of this booklet. The small, he shows us, can be large.
(This review will appear, by and by, in Kyoto Journal, a publication well worth checking out.