Disclaimer: Midwestern poet Karl Elder was my adviser and mentor when I was an undergrad at Lakeland College in the late 1980s, and then beyond when I worked with him in a supportive role for the Great Lakes Writers Festival. Elder, more than any other person, taught me poetry and poets. I am honored to write this review of his latest poetry collection.
Boon: Fifty Poems by Karl Elder showcases the poet’s keen eye and ear. A metrical and metaphoric feat, in language as precise as a sculptor’s chisel in stone, Boon echoes the voices of legends: Stevens, Dacey, Dickinson.
Light and color abound in Boon, as in the poem “11/11,” where in November a solitary maple tree atop a hill still blazes red, “crimson on a stick.” In “A Prose Poem,” Elder presents the nostalgic image of an “old time radio” whose tubes seen another way are a tiny lighted city before traversing imagination into an open countryside where gravestones accomplish a similar, if dimmer, effect.
Reminiscent of Stevens’ Blackbird, Elder’s “L’Hommage,” asks us to look again and again at Rodin’s sculptures as commentary on human comedy and tragedy, that in the end require contemplation: “a chin on a fist.”
In forms free and fixed, Elder shows us new ways of sensing life around us—showing us, as those old transcendentalists did, the sublime in the ordinary.
Boon is filled with joy, humor, wit, and pathos, and at every turn a surprise—an image or idea wholly unexpected.