Speculative Music

August 26, 2013
This debut is, on one hand, a bag of tricks and conceits, wherein the speaker—playful, dishonest, and a tad morose— moves his way through the rooms of ordinary life with a bent of vision just-so off normal. On the other, it’s a book of simple, highly accessible verse, even if the turns Dolven takes surprise and jitter. These 38 poems (and one short libretto) are by those turns jokes, fables and proverbs, stories and anecdotes, and, most of all, tricks of narrative, where Dolven’s unmistakable self-questioning, dark-humored voice can’t help but often shine through. Often the reader is addressed directly: “Don’t be naïve. The poem is my hand… how your mouth moves like that when you read.” “I do hope you find this interesting.” And just as often, Dolven moves to larger statements, exhibiting an existential darkness that can be either humorous—“and here’s the thing, the telephone./ You say you’re coming? Hear, hear!/ You say you’re leaving? There there./ I still can’t hear you—damn this thing—// Hello? Hello? Am I still there?“—or dead serious: “Each thing makes its own wild cry./ Who thought, so many kinds of throat. / Under pressure all confess/ I never knew what I was for.”

Starred review from July 1, 2013
Here is a surprising new poet. He tells us about how, out and about, hands strain at the leashes of arms and at night, right asks left for reassurance only to meet with accusatory protestations of ignorance. We really ought to get them to shake, Dolven concludes, but it's not clear that they fit that way. The poem's speaker and another take Horse Lessons by climbing into the two-man suit clowns don to farcically imitate the animal; besides horse jokes, they learn to walk, trot, canter, gallop, and stand fast, ready for nothing. In other poems, the archetypal syllogism about Socrates and mortality logically comes to entail dancing; an opened and delicately peeled cantaloupe sings ( marry me, marry me, of course); and a kind of solipsism necessitates that everything that envelopes the poet becomes his puppet, including the reader, for The poem is my hand. / Can't you feel it here inside you, friend? In a time when every other poet seems to have an extraliterary agenda, Dolven rather old-fashionedly makes poetry out of words and their implications, as if he were some Elizabethan sonneteer as or more intent on delight than passion, on thought than emotion. Well, delightful he issmart, too.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)