BOOK REVIEWS

By Casey Kwang

Pinball Publishing, 2002

Paperback, 81 pages, $14.00

By Douglas Spangle

In 1999, when I reviewed Casey Kwang’s first book of poems, On Blue Felix Paper, I made the safe prediction that he would be a sure gift to the 21st Century. A featured reading at the late lamented Café Lena proved that he had the stuff to keep the room at attention — no mean feat, given the persnicketiness of a bunch of competing poets.

The success of his first book — it was nominated for the Oregon Book Award that year — and his ample charm and talent made me want to stay in touch with his work. Poems and broadsides surfaced from time to time. Encouraging.

Pinball Publishing has released the second collection I was waiting for, an attractive digest-size collection called Copia. Happily, Kwang seems to have avoided the Sophomore Jinx; this collection has its own strengths, built upon the strengths of the first.

On Blue Felix Paper was a strong first book, but Copia leaves behind the tentative quality that a first collection inevitably possesses, and gains a sense of confidence. Casey Kwang, having found a form and a voice, seems to have really hit his stride.

Along with the feeling of literary assurance, he seems more comfortable with his everyday existence. The slacker who in the previous collection slouched glumly from crummy job to Chichi Bar with a snootful of booze or acid has become a much happier camper in Copia. The woozy Fupduck of On Blue Felix Paper is a thing of the past, the poetry now a vehicle of style and grace.

Is it just a matter of having grown up in the meantime, or has the act of writing, as William S. Burroughs once observed, saved his soul? His circumstances don’t seem much different than before, but Kwang can now clinch a poem about barhopping with a stanza like

but the feeling stays the same

that high-flying stuck feeling

like playing airplane

& being hoisted up by your stomach

your arms out

soaring

just waiting to be let down.

— "Bar Hopping on a Bike"

And if you think that’s nice, you should read the love poems. Yeah, there are the girls, too. Life gets better yet.

After a characteristically freewheeling introduction by Walt Curtis, the pillar of Oregon’s Underground, Kwang opens this collection with poems about his families. He has two, his birth-family in Korea and his adoptive Irish and Italian American one here in Oregon. It is abundantly clear that he loves them all. How tragic is that?

He’s inspiring and readable, with the gift of being both eloquent and unpretentious. The most discerning sensibilities among his elders have praised his work.

At the age of about thirty, Casey Kwang is one of Oregon’s best young poets, a class act, with a new collection that is sure to be nominated for the Oregon Book Award, not one but two loving families, a clutch of sweet and beautiful young women, and a good job (in these hard times): Casey Kwang ought to have a feeling of accomplishment. Was it like that for Bukowski?

 

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