{"id":2119,"date":"2011-12-28T10:32:22","date_gmt":"2011-12-28T15:32:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/wpblog\/?p=2119"},"modified":"2012-07-15T20:02:28","modified_gmt":"2012-07-16T00:02:28","slug":"the-humanist-a-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/the-humanist-a-review\/","title":{"rendered":"The Humanist: A Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cAs if magic were not the impossible
\nbut the potential in each one of us
\nto imagine and make as dreamers make
\nfrom the universal stuff
\nof love and death\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

So writes Matthew Gasda in his search for imagination in the world, a chapbook of poetry entitled The Humanist<\/em>. Gasda\u2019s poetry looks for the beauty and love in the world, in the everyday things we have around us, in the simple moments of lying in a garden or walking the aisles in a supermarket. The Humanist<\/em>, released only a few weeks ago, is Gasda\u2019s first published chapbook of poetry.<\/p>\n

Gasda\u2019s work takes on the age old themes of poetry: happiness, memory, life, death, and love. A conversation in the aisle of a supermarket transforms into introspection about what death means to an individual. He takes inspiration from the likes of Shakespeare, Wagner, and Bernini to name a few, and turns out a few very nice insights throughout the book. From his introduction: \u201cThe Philosopher believes he can uncover the ground of being through reason. The poet rejects reason and insists that being must be shown.\u201d Another bit of philosophy from the poem \u201cPuncture\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cHappiness is not a transformation
\nof the object but the subject\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of the poems share images and inspiration. Art, painting, light, sound, and nature are some of Gasda\u2019a favorite themes to draw on. Painting is a topic of the first three poems in the collection, and the name Rilke appears in at least three poems. Nature, like for so many poets before him, plays a large role in Gasda\u2019s poems. He takes a microscope eye to the minute details of the natural world and then magnifies the beauty of a single moment. The poem \u201cStill Life with Anemones\u201d begins with four anemones in a jar, grows outward into a conversation of art and form, and then back inward again to the space the anemones inhabit.\u00a0 Another example comes from \u201cSummer Monological I\u201d which also takes a keen look at nature\u2019s minute details:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe intricacies of a hummingbird\u2019s wings are
\nextraordinarily clear if you close your eyes
\nand let the folds of existence pack themselves
\ntogether and condense into something crystalline.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of the most beautiful poems in this chapbook are also the shortest. \u201cThe Painter\u201d and \u201cThe Painter II\u201d are beautiful examples of Gasda\u2019s ability to lightly dot words on the page, playing with space and position, to create a fresh, crisp feel from the poem. \u201cDisclosure\u201d is also wonderful in its simplicity. The shorter poems work well interspersed with the longer works of the chapbook; they add variety of depth and give the reader a little breathing time. The endings of the poems are also especially beautiful. Light and delicate and wonderfully different from some of the wordiness that populates the central bulk of most of the poems. They catch you off guard or bring you full circle back to the opening lines, to a question or dilemma posed at the beginning of the poem and closed off at the end.<\/p>\n

But Gasda occasionally gets long-winded. There are moments when he seems to be writing one very long run-on sentence broken up to look like verse, or simply going in circles. From his introduction: \u201cThe poet deepens his life-world by deepening his facility with words and the words themselves deepen with the gradual deepening of the life-world.\u201d The two poems that are most guilty of this are \u201cThe Philosopher\u201d and \u201cPuncture,\u201d both standing at close to six pages and both feeling more like an exercise in circular thought than verse. That is to say that sometimes Gasda gets a bit bogged down in the philosophy he wants to present and doesn\u2019t quite do enough showing in his poetry.<\/p>\n

The weakest part of The Humanist<\/em> is the introduction. Gasda\u2019s opening words \u2013 \u201cPoetry must begin with the crisis of the imagination struggling to overcome death and annihilation. Poetry which assumes a different subject risks flippancy and irrelevance.\u201d It\u2019s heavy and overreaching, but not quite so heavy and overreaching as when he later says, \u201cThe poet is always making himself universal, is always universalizing his own experience by daring to write.\u201d No doubt all poets believe their poetry to be universally important and encompass all humanity on some level, but rather than listening to a wordy expose on what the poet thinks his poems are, I simply want to experience them for myself.<\/p>\n

The Humanist<\/em> is Gasda\u2019s first book of poetry. His poems have appeared in Leveler Poetry, Gadfly Online, and The Four Cornered Universe. He currently resides in Brooklyn. The Humanist<\/em> is available for purchase from Amazon.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cAs if magic were not the impossible but the potential in each one of us to imagine and make as dreamers make from the universal stuff of love and death\u2026\u201d So writes Matthew Gasda in his search for imagination in the world, a chapbook of poetry entitled The Humanist. Gasda\u2019s poetry looks for the beauty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,223,220],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2119"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2119"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3132,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2119\/revisions\/3132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}