The Swimmer

January 18, 2016
Philosopher-poet Koethe (ROTC Kills) “meanders on/ Like a country road” through the minutes and details of daily life in his 10th collection of verse: “I dwell instead/ On minutiae, on little highs defining days/ In need of definition.” His poems demonstrate particular fascinations with age, friendship, the narrative self, mathematics, and music, among other themes. Koethe continues to show the deft technical touch that has brought him such renown, but too often his poems feel comfortable and easy, like they have little at stake or are slightly out of touch with the politics and movements of the present. Other poems offer lines that feel overly clever, as if the poet is more concerned with amusing himself than engaging his reader in new ways of thinking: “I’m witness to my life, but as for/ Participating in it, I’ll take the Fifth.” Yet Koethe’s moments of self-reflexivity also present insight into his process (“I like to get drunk and I like to write”), including the creation of his speakers: “I (whichever I this is) saw Follies last year.” What feel like the book’s shortcomings, however, may be coping mechanisms for dealing with the anxiety of mortality. Koethe’s poems are able to offer the kind of idiosyncratic musings that will keep the reader thinking beyond the confines of the page: “The world never ends—what ends are explanations of the way it is.”

December 1, 2015

In his tenth volume of poems, Koethe (ROTC Kills) explores the changeable landscape of daily life and his place in the universe, especially as poet and philosopher. "Are you just going to go on writing poems like this, / Writing for posterity? Posterity isn't interested...." He wonders if his early poems suffered from a "madness to explain" that now feels "quaint/ As though there were nothing to explain anymore." Though writing from the trope of the ordinary, Koethe intersperses moments of humor and language play--internal rhyme and rhythm--as well as deep philosophical questioning through abstract meditions on time ("La Duree") and Manifest Destiny ("Tulsa"), for example. Some might call his poems pessimistic; Koethe refers to them, more often than not, as disillusioned. "Poetry is stylized indifference, a drawing back/ From the divide between my life and its negation--/ Not because it's empty, but because it's full, too full." VERDICT A welcome new book from an important voice.--Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2016
Titled after a famous John Cheever short story that was made into a movie starring Burt Lancaster, Koethe's (ROTC Kills, 2012) tenth volume of poetry pays homage to the writer and his indelible tale through imagery of home, motion, and change. But Koethe's interpretation of The Swimmer is as a reimagining / Of a life from the perspective of disillusionment and age. So, within his poems, he asks tough questions about the temporal nature of life and follows his mind's journeys toward answers as well as their inevitable disintegration. Dissolution is another theme threaded throughout the collection, and it helps establish the bittersweet sense of contemplating both a banal and beautiful life. Here the world and narrator are at once engaged and indifferent. I'm witness to my life, but as for / Participating in it, I'll take the Fifth. Such wry twists in Koethe's poems plunge the reader into a cold pool, where the warming stupor of philosophical pondering is refreshingly washed away by frankness and a rejection of sentimentality.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)