The Man In Booth in the Midtown Tunnel by Doug Holder ( Review by Pamel Annas--Professor of English/UMass/Boston
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Doug Holder is above all an urban poet, an observer chronicling the everyday sights and absurdities of Somerville, Boston and New York City in plain talk flavored with cool irony and sudden startling bursts of imagery. His settings include hospital rooms, bars, coffee shops, Harvard Yard, the post office, buses and subway trains, the Boston Public Library, Shea Stadium, housing projects, city streets, and the Midtown Tunnel from Queens to Manhattan which is the location of the book\u2019s title poem. His characters are bizarre and ordinary like all of us. Several of the poems are inspired by newspaper stories\u2014about a woman who sat on a toilet for two years in her boyfriend\u2019s apartment, about an old man who murdered his equally aged wife, about a middle aged man who died on a subway train: \u201cthe Daily dropped/ From his hands. . . .The trains backed up/ From Cambridge to Dorchester.\u201d
I\u2019m reminded in the pages of this collection of meeting, a year or two before her death, the artist Alice Neel, who painted gorgeously surreal ironic portraits of famous and ordinary people in the 1930s and 40s--and shivering as she looked me over. Doug Holder looks at the world through a similarly sharp and amused set of eyes. Yet there is no malice but a profound sympathy here\u2014for the helplessness of aging and of poverty, for physical and mental illnesses, for the complexity of family relations\u2014and most of all, for the isolation and loneliness lurking underneath tenaciously crowded city life. In the title poem of the collection, the man in the booth in the Midtown Tunnel \u201cpaces the perimeter/ Of his cage\u201d while outside the cars whip by: \u201cAnd we are/ Faceless and a blur,/ Behind thick plates/ Of light-bleached glass.\u201d
However, let me assure you this is not a gloomy collection of poems. There are rich nuggets of humor and wry reflection throughout this collection and, to combat the isolation of urban life, in almost every poem a relationship is forged between the observing eye and the subject of the poem. So, for example, as the speaker of the poem observes a woman nursing in a restaurant in \u201cPrivate Dining Under a Blouse\u201d:
I saw
The infant emerge
Sleeping
Held in an untroubled
Dream.
I sucked on my straw
Flattening the plastic stem
Still awake
And troubled.
A few of the poems in this collection, like the one above, segue gracefully in subject from Holder\u2019s last book, Of All the Meals I Had Before: Poems About Food and Eating. Another is a poem toward the end of the book, \u201cThe Last Hotdog\u201d: \u201cShe brought it/ to his sick bed,/ He bit through/ The red casing/ The familiar orgasm/ Of juice/ Hitting the roof/ Of his mouth\u201d. And one more food-focused poem, \u201cAt the Fruit Stand,\u201d which is about bananas and melons and grapes and is too erotic to discuss in a family publication. However, you will enjoy it. And the whole collection.
* Pamela Annas is a Professor of English at University of Massachusetts/Boston and the author of A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath.
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