Cars and Traffic: Hugh Blanton Reviews Tim Dodd's Galaxy Drip

Tim Dodd's acerbic new collection of poetry does not give the reader a warm welcome—the epigraph is taken from Raymond Chandler: "And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles." Ace Boggess, author of The Prisoners and Escape Envy, says of Dodd: "Timothy Dodd writes with the energy and frenzy of a man being chased by assassins, hell hounds, the police." A lot of the poems in this collection are like an octopus wriggling its way through the eye of a needle, astringent and prickly with vividness. If you want headstrong verse, Dodd's your man.

Dodd's latest book, Galaxy Drip, with echoes of the Beats and the Meats, is tragicomic and often wincingly peculiar. He's not a confessional poet (at least not in the solipsistic fashion that is becoming popular today), but there are threads of public accusation throughout the book: "your uplifting dinner is another creature's/ tragedy, demise." "Each early morning, we millions believe: worker/ ants for our colonies." Some poets are described as lyric, others as narrative, Dodd wears both hats well. Automobiles and traffic (including a Peel P50 that will send Yanks running to Google) appear often, including American's addiction to their cars. Filippo Marinetti and the Futurists would have loved to have seen Galaxy Drip. (There's also an ode to Greyhound bus stations, a sort of tribute to Americans who have divorced their cars.)

Dodd has a natural, unforced and slightly imprecise meter, a reader not paying close attention will miss it. From the poem "Statehood":

          Sherry's sipping sherry,

               Dick's drinking whatever;

          red Florida sky dazzling

               behind their new beach condo.

The poem continues on in similar rhythm for thirty lines, never letting up. Dodd's poems don't unfold, they carom downhill at high velocity. There's no milking the endings—he just walks out the door. In "Life and Death in East Wheeling" he wraps it up: "In thick air float strange opportunities,/ and I think a moment of all the little empty jobs we do." That's an ending even David Lerner would like.

If a poem stumbles because it's too wild, it's because he's raging with excess. At fifty-three he can no longer be called a younger poet, but his poems brim with the energy of someone discovering poetry for the first time. His poem "The Boxer":

          Only the laundry room

          knows his lime green

          shorts, for in the office

          they hide under dark

          grey suits as he phones

          and files, traffic sliding

          outside the window.

Times are not propitious for poetry—the Instagram poets with their uplifting vacuous guff and poor-me trauma are selling thousands of weightless books while poetry of substance goes unnoticed. The honest prosiness in Dodd's poems shows off his poetic chops, he swaggers through his verse both cocksure and whimsical. He writes on common enough subjects, but he begins in odd places and you never know what you'll find when you turn the page.

Dodd puts his lyric talent on display several times throughout the collection: "the day is forgivable, maybe life is livable." "all laid to casket, surrounded by/ the mess of modern roads, traffic." (There's that traffic again!) "I've neatly noted/ Maybelline isn't make-be-// lieve. "End of the line, out of time, nothing comes alive." Dodd's a poet better quoted than described. In his poem "Cornstalk in Point Pleasant" he may have been conjuring Raymond Carver, but if so Carver's got him by the scruff of the neck:

          For our cheeks are pockmarked

          not by love or lust, but by hammer

          blows, sugared teeth and gasoline.

          There is rarely a rise anymore

          from these alcohol-damaged gullies:

          neither language, nor pride,

          nor our pant-legged peckers.

Galaxy Drip is Dodd's third poetry collection (he already has a fourth on the way, Orbits 52 from Broadstone Books) and he's also got four short story collections under his belt. He's got an MFA from UTEP and he even has an Instagram page where he exhibits his paintings. There's no such thing as an ideal poet—it's actually a poet's limitations that invent and define them. Dodd's virtues have his defects surrounded, snarling, "This, this is a poem. Kill your automobiles."

Galaxy Drip

by Timothy Dodd, 76 pages

Luchador Press, $15.00

Hugh Blanton's latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.

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