Reciting From Memory by Jim Landwehr
Underground Voices, 2016
Jim Landwehr’s Reciting From Memory is a collection meant to be read on a lake’s beach during a camping trip in the summer sun or between bites while fishing in the middle of a Midwest lake mid-fall. Landwehr captivates readers with memories of family and friends, revealing lovely little things that tend to be missed in the mundane. Let Landwehr charm with his humor, astound with his reflections, and pull you into his past.
Landwehr is hilarious. This is clear from the very beginning of the book with his second poem “Above Ground Rules,” which features rules like “don’t cheat or lie / unless it’s about weight or age,” and “get good insurance / and live dangerously.” He also brings readers back to the eighties in “Eighties Mash Up”:
We were Footloose in the nineteen eighties
dancing Like a Virgin and Shouting out Tears for Fears
with turned up polo collars for men and shoulder pads for the ladies
even though both looked stupid.
Many of his poems have little punch lines, but some are funny throughout, like his poem “Close Encounters,” in which he claims his teens must have been abducted by aliens:
Now aliens inhabit the children
disguised as
gangly, moody, hungry teenagers
who look like my kids, yet
speak not our language.
Landwehr’s playful humor remains even in his serious reflections on his religion, “a ritualistic appreciation / and the foundations for a faith / that has stuck like / Elmer’s glue on the palms / of my heart.” He looks into his past in parochial schools, his discussions with his brother, and his meetings with other theologians. Religious symbols appear throughout these poems. He also takes the time to address God directly, as in the poem “Starlet Letters”:
dear God,
I know it seems presumptuous
given your dominion
sovereignty and
your assurance that
it’s all part of Your plan
but I think that the small
pinholes of starlight down here
do not compensate for
those supernovas in Your heaven
He lets God know that he wishes God had not taken the “supernovas” from his life—his father, his uncle, his sister, his brother—ghosts that appear in other poems. But Landwehr’s faith is still strong despite the hardships in his life, which is apparent in much of his poetry.
Landwehr welcomes readers into his stories about road trips, first days of school, catching fish with his kids, and more. In “On A Road,” we get a taste of life on the road with friends:
Hurtling through the Nevada desert
three of us boy men in our twenties
in a rented ‘83 chevy wagon four banger
haulin’ ass in the middle of the night
jacked up on No Doz and Pepsi
thirty hours from the bar we started at
in Minnesota on our way to LA.
He paints the moment with his description of the car, the “boy men,” the to and from. Now this is a road trip. Landwehr captures moments like this from his past and throws the reader straight into the middle of it, like we are right there beside him on his journeys.
Kathrine Yets lives and works as a substitute teacher in Wisconsin Dells, WI. Her reviews can be found in Mom Egg Review, Blue Fifth Review, and elsewhere. When she is not writing reviews of poetry, she is writing poetry of her own.