Book Reviews

DAN CAMPION

A Playbill For Sunset

ICE CUBE PRESS

Dan Campion, Prairie lights, Iowa City, Thursday, July 14 at 7 p.m., Free

Formulaic poetry seems to be simultaneously under- and overrated, something force-fed us by teachers and then never seen again— as though only the archaic men of our textbooks were allowed to use the respective forms. Truthfully, formulaic poems have never actually left the literary milieu.

In A Playbill For Sunset (Ice Cube Press, 2022), Dan Campion brings new light to the sonnet, the form which dominates this book. Campion offers tribute to his intellectual and artistic heroes in both form and name.

Opening with “Time’s Arrow,” Campion advises readers in his very first line, “We are not in any rush,” which is true of the anthology as a whole. He takes his time meandering through nature scenes and emotional revelations, never hurrying a poem or belaboring a point. His poems are leisurely, and he seems to want his audience to experience them as such.

Much of the content of these deliberate, gentle poems will be inaccessible to a large swath of the potential readership. The poems are sometimes about, if not overtly referencing, esoteric intellectual content. I found myself keeping my search engine open throughout reading, realizing early on I’d need background information on some references, as with the poem “Das Boot.” The selection references surrealist and dadaist artists, Chicago architecture and the Greek mythological character Proteus. While, in the end, I liked the poem, it was necessary that I ingest the background information and come back to it later to understand it. That said, “Das Boot” makes the important point that art about war often makes war more palatable, despite war being surreal and traumatic.

This, maybe, is the power within a leisurely book of poetry. When absorbed as it’s meant to be—slowly and deliberately—the points are made and internalized in a subtle manner. Favorite poems of mine used concrete images as metaphors for the human condition. In “The Parrots,” there is no rush to get to the point. It opens describing a collective of birds and the life of parrots in general, slowly distilling the poem to its final three lines, “It’s marvelous how we clutch, over time, / a perch so slick, so worn, so hard, so slight. / Flung to the gutter, even there we’re chic.”

This ending is obviously not a heroic couplet (the final two lines of a traditional sonnet, which rhyme with each other, while the preceding follow an ABAB / CDCD scheme). Other of the 14-line poems do not follow the formal rules of the sonnet, and a small handful of the poems are not sonnets at all. Longer poems with shorter lines offer a literal break from form, but they also signal narrative and rhythmic change, a break from expectations. My favorite of these is “Out on Route 6,” which feels like the soundtrack for a roadtrip in the country. Campion is your companion and nature is your guide.

So much of this book feels like an homage to transcendental poets and Americana that it almost seems out of time. Campion, maybe, lives in the woods learning writing from birdsong and watching both sunrises and sunsets. A perfect set of bookends, the “Time’s Arrow” line “We are not in any rush” is balanced by the final lines of the collection, closing the titular poem, “A Playbill for Sunset”: “There’s always time. The sun will always set. / In mask and buskins, dusk may answer yet.” —Sarah Elgatian

lAuREl SNyDER; IlluSTRATED By DAN SANTAT

Endlessly Ever After

CHRONICLE BOOKS

Poet Laurel Snyder, an Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum, is a Geisel Award-winning children’s book author. Endlessly Ever After is her first collaboration with Caldecott Award-winning illustrator Dan Santat (beloved in my home for his work on Corey Rosen Schwartz’s The Three Ninja Pigs). It is not, however, her first pickyour-path book.

THIS WINSOME FRACTURED FAIRy TAlE IS UN-PUT-DOWN-ABlE.

Her first published work, in 2005 (written before she went down the path to writing for children), was a chapbook called Daphne & Jim: A choose-your-own-adventure biography in verse. There, she turned the form to the task of exploring a couple’s courtship. That couple was based on her own parents, a sign of an intimacy with and trust in that form that is also evident in Endlessly Ever After (Chronicle Books, April 2022).

This winsome fractured fairy tale is un-put-down-able.

Of course, I had my own period of obsession with the original Choose Your Own Adventure series of books. They’re a deeply safe way for children to explore both the freedom and the fatalism of decision making. They make a reader feel as though they are collaborating in the act of creation, spinning alternate universes into being.

The struggle with a picture book crafted this way is that there is, necessarily, a hero to the story. The “you” isn’t solely a cipher, but a character whose role you step into. In this case, Snyder and Santat have created Rosie, a delightful amalgam of storybook tropes who, even while beholden to the reader’s choices, manages to exhibit consistent character traits of compassion, resilience and curiosity. Through a particular gift for facial expressions, Santat offers a visual of Rosie that seems to mature as more choices are made, a pragmatic child who learns enough from her choices that she wouldn’t dare call any of them “mistakes.”

Snyder’s snappy rhymes guide Rosie and the reader on a journey through a whole forest of fairy tales. The third little pig’s sturdy home lies just a few paths over from a gingerbread house where two hapless children await rescue. Jack is searching for his goose, dwarves hold a wake and a princess waits in a tower for a kiss. The storytelling is done in verse, but each choice is laid out plainly in prose. That break in flow and form drives home the importance of pausing before choice-making, something children—and all of us—could use more reminders about.

There are plenty of unhappy endings included in Endlessly Ever After. This book embraces the darkness of fairy tales as well as their joy and their effortless moralizing. But at no point does the reader feel trapped, or disappointed, or let down. The poetry of the text and the warmth of the illustrations make sure that the harshest lessons are graciously and gratefully received. And the happy endings are like hidden treasures, shining brightly when found.

Snyder and Santat have crafted a book that children (and their adults) will want to read and reread again and again. It’s perfect for curling up in a cozy chair on a cold or rainy day and escaping into a world where all things are possible. —Genevieve Trainor