Ethershop, Fall 2009

Peter Klappert opens his collection like a novel, a novel written with a poet’s voice, with Mahoney the Bad Traveler, a man who will think with my tongue, I will find my truth in the elaboration of lies… He continues with And would you know where my tongue led me? Into Cholera, Dysentery, Typhus.  The main character is the narrator, a man in post-WWII France who speaks as if you are sitting across the table from him, listening.

That’s all they want, a veterinarian

and a priest, pacing at the portals of their

(pardon my saliva)

lives-…

The narrator is a believer, but does not obey God. He’s a sarcastic Frenchman, who lets the reader in on his thoughts and opinions of those around him. A man who talks of the past as if it were the present.

In the section entitled Subjects of Discontent, he asks to no one in particular what will happen to the common man and woman when the war begins.

However, when he talks of the entitled, the rich:

And when war is forced to them

like maize to a goose, there are some can dance

though their feet be nailed in place, some few

who fatten and step the abdominal drum,

who grunt and beat their wings if they cannot

speak for the thickness in their throats.

It is revealed here, with the word “maize” that the Klappart is not a Frenchman himself. However, Klappert is almost entirely convincing, for to make foie gras, a French delicacy, geese are force fed to fatten their livers.

Klappart writes a poem about Hitler entitled Adolphe, Or The Sad Young Man. When writing a post-WWII France poem, Hitler is a subject that cannot be avoided. It’s a poem describing not the cruelty, not the actions of Hitler, but of the estranged man he was before he gained power.

It’s a difficult thing to pull off: pity for Hitler.

The conversations are the subjects of his poetry. Letting the reader be a witness to WWII’s effects on French society – Jews, Catholics, and the undefined. There are repeated characters, such as Ignace, Estienne, and Dustbin. All sitting around the same table as you, listening to the narrator. The narrator repeats what these characters say for the reader.

Peter Klappert has published six collections of poetry, including Lugging Vegetables to Nantucket. His poetry essays and reviews have appeared widely in magazines, journals, anthologies and textbooks. His most recent collection, Chokecherries: New and Selected Poems, 1966-99, was published in 2000. Klappert has taught at Harvard, William and Mary, Rollins, and New College, and, since 1978, George Mason University in northern Virginia.

~Heather Greider