Playful Song Called Beautiful

Playful Song Called Beautiful is, like most collections in my experience, somewhat of a mixed bag, evoking a range of response from “Loved this!” to “meh.” But even if an individual poem wasn’t to my liking, they almost invariably impressed in smaller segments (singular lines, a passage, a stanza). And in nearly every instance, Blair nailed the landing; I can’t think of the last time I read a collection where I reacted to positively to ending after ending, regardless of what had come before. There’s more here than those endings, but give me a collection of the last stanza or two of every poem and I’d be thrilled with the end product.

Beyond the strength of the endings, Blair makes excellent use of repetitive sound, as in the repeated “u” and “s” of “cups the windy strum of sky,” or the hard “K” sound in “sank into the milk gone murky pink in her bucket.” These moments are often combined with often striking images or language combinations, as when a storm falls on a boy, “the first parted coins of hard rain knuckling/cold across his skull/like the good lessons given/to good boys,” or in the description of “the yellow mendicant grace of/a coyote’s teeth.”

Frequently, these images involve a sense of violence or chaos, which works well in individual doses, but if I had one specific complaint about the collection as a whole it’s that I wished for a bit more varied a tone, a few more moments of refuge. They exist, but they feel swamped by all that rages around them.

But its original use of language and deft use of sound, combined with Blair’s almost preternatural ability to stick the landing so consistently, make it easy to recommend Playful Song Called Beautiful despite that quibble.

Playful Song Called Beautiful by John Blair is the co-winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize for 2015. Blair is the author of the award-winning collection of short stories American Standard, which won the Drue Heinz Literature Award, one of the world's most prestigious prizes for short fiction, as well as three prize-winning collections of poetry.

Blair's collection compliments co-winners Tigue's collection System of Ghosts as it takes different subject matter and creates the same type of art. Playful Song Called Beautiful includes science a main feature. This year it seems that geology and plate tectonics are popular poetry themes. Blair, however, takes the reader father with references to quantum physics and he does it in a way that seems very natural and flowing. There is no forcing the subject into verse; It is completely unpretentious. There is even a play on quark particles and with Joyce’s "Three Quarks for Muster Mark."

There are passing references made through the book of famous historical figures like Rumi, Faulkner, Nietzsche, Oswald, Goethe, and Galileo. The wide range of writers, thinkers, and even the assassin is mixed with a variety of locations including Oklahoma. Fort Sill, Oklahoma is the home of Geronimo’s unmolested grave and Tulsa, the home of Six Flags Over Jesus -- Oral Roberts University.

The title is represented by a short poem taken from a translation on a Chinese children’s record. It is followed by other badly translated into English phrases. Surprisingly, it works very well -- enjoyable so. Blair does an excellent job of combining complex subjects into poetry and making them more understandable than they are in prose. Converting sophisticated subject matter into enjoyable reading is an art in itself. An excellent collection and well deserving of the Iowa Poetry Prize.

A beautiful collection of poems. A wonderful addition to any poetry collection!