Mike Jurkovic's Mooncussers

 

Mike Jurkovic, Mooncussers, Luchador Press.

      Mooncussers -- the title alone suggests the book poetic qualities of Mike Jurkovic’s new collection.  Jurkovic likes words, he likes to play with words, and this one is odd and unlikely, semi-obscure and yet colloquial, “pop” even, energetic and enigmatic enough to stand at the head of this new volume from Luchador Press. 

     That same affection for words emerges in his occasionally offbeat lexicon (such as “susurrus”) and unpredictable cultural references beginning with whatever share Disney’s feature may have had on the title but continuing through Billy the Kid, Baku the eater of nightmares, the oceanographer Marie Poland Fish, Buddha’s wife, and a dreadful torture device called the Judas Chair. 

     In the Hudson Valley Jurkovic is prominent as a reader and performer, a central figure in Calling All Poets, who continues to cultivate poetry in performance including the mainline hip tradition of poetry with jazz.  His lines should be read aloud, even by someone alone in a room. In that way his breath units are evident, not long Ginsbergian incantatory lines, but more like the musical phrasing of William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley.  

    His sensibility is shaped by jazz and rock, and a good number of the poems exhibit the disciplined but improvisatory measures of a musician “in the groove.”  This is true of his work in general, not only of his explicit celebrations of the music scene (as in “Breaching Aristotle [month 4],” “Brubeck’s Bar #6,” and “Ill Fitting Suit”).

     Jurkovic is capable of the pure lyric note as when he calls “the river a hug of diamonds.”  (“Grey Note”) or, in the lightest of passages

 

A lot of times

 (when rainbows preside)

I find myself dancing

through God’s good hour.

from  “Light Between Buildings”

 

  Now and then his righteous indignation bubbles over, as when he observes “In a Walmart In Kentucky” “that we condemn every besieged democracy/ but our own,” notes in “17 Two Miles North” that “another black kid’s gone down,” or laments the national obsession with guns in “The Merchant’s Receipt.”  As he comments in another piece “Have you read my stuff/ it’s freaking depressing,” but, then, “I don’t see stars anymore/ just bullet holes where the light sneaks in.” (“where the light sneaks in”)

     Most often, though, Jurkovic’s poetic eye is simply gazing reality in the face and managing to do the dance in spite of the fact that everything is marred by the fallenness of the world and it’s all inexplicable in the end: “They never really explain these things.”   (“Scuff Marks”)  Even in a noir world where a girl’s “bright wide eyes” are a moment later “cisterns of dream” (“Hat Check Girl”), watching vision take shape with poise and style is, if not redemptive, at least reassuring.  Mike Jurkovic is on the stage up front soloing all around and about the catastrophe, making big-hearted clever nudges to build another little machine of words, each offering the solace of company if not surcease of sorrow.

 

each mad essay

must cast doubt

on the one before.

            (Gracie)

 

     He places his words like the seamstress in “The Raw Edge,” “giving no inch more/ than one deserves.”   Jurkovic has woven an acute, engaging, and melodious fabric of vision in Mooncussers.   In his verses, so well-crafted as to seem offhand, he offers the greatest comfort we can enjoy here below, a bemused fellow human contemplating how strange it all is.  The reader might find in his poetry rewards similar to what he hears in music.

 

to hear Monk move

and give us

(in his own disturbed grace)

the inside track

on the outside joke

                     (“Breaching Aristotle [month4]”)