Book Report: The Controlled Clasp by John Bahnke (1972)

Book coverI bought this in one of the three packets of chapbooks that I got for a dollar each at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale this autumn. The three sets of chapbooks and another volume of poetry are about all the books I got, instead focusing on albums as you might recall, gentle reader.

Well, about this book. Apparently it’s a chapbook of “poetry” from 1972. That’s what I gather from limited Internet searches for the book and the poet on the Internet. The first poem, or perhaps the section, is called “Nightmares in the Dark”, and the whole collection with its dated poems ranging from 1968 to 1972 read like a Vietnam veteran working through his PTSD or perhaps a patient in an institution working through some things. The prose poems are reflective of nightmares, where the poet-narrator is in the jungle, or meeting with a woman whom he gores or who gores him, and there’s a clown that keeps reappearing.

Most of them are in paragraph form, not verse, and some themes repeat. But it’s not very poetic, and it’s not compelling reading. I finished it, not browsing during football–the prose is too dense to glance down and glance up–but in the chair just for completeness sake. And to add to my annual tally easily.

So far, no nightmares of my own on account of it, which is nice.

So probably something to avoid.

But I get the sense that the story behind the book is better than the book, and that’s quite probably lost.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories