Russell Brakefield's Irregular Heartbeats at the Park West draws from a deep well of emotional honesty and musical language. These 52 poems take readers to the homes of dead writers, live music venues, and riverbanks and forests, as seen in "Search Party": "When we yelled at the sky,/ coyotes yelled back. Stars too, their voices/ like pinched drops of moonlight." Most often, however, the poems take readers into emotional territory, mapping the ache and aftermath of loss.
In "Flight Plans," the speaker tells students about extinct birds, "but they don't believe me/ that such animals could exist/ or that beauty will ever be/ that at odds with abundance." Then the poem turns, addressing an unnamed subject fighting cancer. Though the final lines focus on "all the good left to come/ your throat full of feathers," it is colored by a sense of loss anticipated. The poem "Arcade" addresses the daily weight of grieving: "Mourning, it turns out, is its own/ simulation--the screen black and blinking,/ the path narrow and savage and ghosted."
Brakefield (Field Recordings) tinkers with line structures, sometimes employing line breaks and spacing to allow a poem to move unpredictably across the page. Regardless of form, the poems often take a reflective stance, as seen in "Prayers for Home (ii)": "What's left, I wonder,/ of what's made me/ broken a little, yoked/ to a certain type of sadness." This phrasing is apt, as these poems seem yoked to a certain type of sadness. But there is also joy, family, ritual, and memory; together these things make a beautiful collection just as certainly as they make a life. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian