Steve Gehrke's The Pyramids of Malpighi

At the behest of a friend, I read Steve Gehrke's “Secretarial School Graduation Dance, 1968” and really liked it. I looked into his available books, and even though he had a newer one I went with his second, where "Secretarial School Dance" was taken from, The Pyramids of Malpighi. It's no surprise Philip Levine chose this title for the 2002 Levine Prize; it's not that Gehrke writes 'like' Levine, though there is a camaraderie with, and a sympathy for the working class that each shares, and most importantly, which never amounts to chin-chucking or pedanticism. Both writing styles complement each other, and both poets employ a thematic reach that is laudatory while appearing wholly sincere—neither seems to grope for what they have to say, and if any groping occurred it was more in how to say it, during the writing process, and such rummaging has since been absorbed or trickled away, like watery runoff after a storm.

There's only eighteen poems in The Pyramids of Malpighi, but at eighty pages it doesn't feel slight. The book is anchored by two longer poems that mirror each other, the title poem and “Inside the Dialysis Machine.” The book is broken into four section—the first and third with seven and nine poems respectively, the second and fourth comprised of the aforementioned anchor poems. In “The Invention of Pointillism,” Gehrke establishes certain motifs that are to recur throughout the book—science and spirituality, birth and death—while linking Seurat's painting, The Circus, done in the titular style, a reproduction of which appears in the poem on one of its characters' walls, with his own poetic style, or at least the style chosen here with which to deliver the poem. By that I mean, like Pointillism, which is a cousin of Impressionism, in which tiny dots of primary-colors are used to generate secondary colors, Gehrke's work can be prismatic, image-wise, but it can also introduce primary images that give way to secondary ones:

Once, in the apartment of a woman I barely knew,
in a room made of blurred light and ashes
with carpet the color of very old newspaper,
I began to believe love was a collection of sighs
and small gestures that flew off as we move. (7)

Consider, as noted above, in the poem's first stanza, the setting of a strange apartment, barely known, leading to “blurred light and ashes”—indistinction—carpet colored like “very old newspaper” as faded memories, hazy words; love as “a collection of sighs,” minute emotions separated into small moments; even “small gestures” that “flew off”—dissipated, into the ether. All of this, working together to, in a way, fabricate a verbal Pointillism, to give us a sense of the room with its parts but also the room as a whole. That Gehrke does what he does with such a high level of skill makes reading these poems 'easy,' in an immediate way, but afterward little depth charges begin going off, compelling the reader to go back over what has just been read in order to find the oblique details.

In terms of style, Gehrke here proves to be, if not restless in an adroit way, then cognizant of ways in which to best serve each poem. Perhaps they began differently, but the cumulative end result is a treat for the eyes, as well as ears: there's step lines and regulated patterns of indentation, as well as stanzaic variety and even prose poems—a form that, like Bigfoot I wonder if it really exists? But Gehrke pulls it off, because the language is 'poetic' enough to both keep the book's flow going, while breaking it up in deceptive ways.