Actions in the Orchards

Review by Nicholas Alexander Hayes

In my twenties and thirties, I felt Baudrillard on a pale horse (occasionally with Ballard riding aside) wrapped the pall of simulacrum around the world for me. The vain specters of symbols without referents have helped guide me not just through contemporary museums but the lived world. Yet some pre-Modern part of my psyche remains like Captain Ahab wanting to thrust its harpoon through symbol to the deeper meaning of the world. Now I well know that the world is perhaps a tad larger than Walt Whitman and we must excuse its contradictions from time to time.

But ekphrastic verse can test me. It can at times set up a chamber of mirrors which might provide an interesting visual but unlike Ahab or Conan the Destroyer the aesthetics and process dissuades me from looking for substance or the sorcerer beyond the frame. The poet felt awe looking and indulges. No harm, no shame. Sometimes evoking awe and sometimes not so much.

Fred Schmalz succeeds in his work by grounding this ekphrastic impulse to specific locality. For instance in “Julius Caesar Gallery”, the poet provides a grounded vision of the Chicago River Front. Reading the work, I see myself strolling outside the Merchandise Mart under the bronze busts of entrepreneurs while Schmalz conjures Romans on the Rhine. But this metamorphosis does not cause the disorientation of hyperreality’s miasma. Instead, it builds stability through metaphor, complement, and sympathetic association.

Seemingly paradoxically he also finds success in embracing ambiguity in poems like “Some Animals.” If Schmaltz has kept to the ekphrastic conceit, perhaps I am unfamiliar with the work or perhaps he has propelled the poem far from the inspiration. He also finds himself far from identifying the animals in the poem (except for cats, which he roguishly acknowledges.) His inability to create a taxonomy of the unknown provides a self-contained litany of parts and their relations to each other.

Overall, the strength of Schmalz works lays in his willingness to conceal or reveal the source material. This frees the poems from the sources while not always detaching them from a tether to meaning. He approaches ekphrasis with nimbleness that serves the work and the reader well.

Actions in the Orchards
Fred Schmalz
Nightboat Book
ISBN: 978-1937658984