Beauty in the Broken: A Review of Douglas Cole’s The Gold Tooth in the Crooked Smile of God
Jessica Purdy There is much beauty to behold in Douglas Cole’s compulsively readable poetry collection “The Gold Tooth in the Crooked Smile of God”. As a whole, these poems leave the reader with the feeling of movement in depictions of gritty landscapes and the people whose dreams and failures inhabit them. These places are filled with memorable characters who the poet presents to the reader without judgment, and often with an open-eyed wonder. The reader winds up feeling like a witness and a friend. In a poem entitled “Beauty”, beauty is described in varying levels of splendor and unexpected metaphor. It is “the burned husk of an old house/ with a crime scene strip around it/ I pass each night on my way to you.” In “Invisible Land” the speaker is at the only bar unaffected by the city’s power outage and describes the storm’s effects: “The last/ leaves were ripped to shreds./ This would about do it—/ all that gold and red would get/ washed right down the street—/back to gray and black for a while./ I wasn’t completely without responsibilities.” The juxtaposition of the landscape with the speaker’s state of mind is one more beautiful effect of Cole’s poetic skill. Some poems deliver brutality with narrative simplicity as in the marvelously brave and vulnerable “Father and Son” where the speaker is forced to box the son of his father’s friend. Description here is factual, the emotions of the speaker come out in lines taut with anger: “I fought the big dumb kid,/ while dad’s friend hit a bottle with a knife/ to start and stop the rounds/...The big kid hit hard. I didn’t let on./ I could see my drunk father was proud/ that I was sticking it out”. The reader, at once horrified and filled with compassion, is there for this speaker. Often the poems rely on line breaks in lieu of punctuation to create their perpetual energy. I found myself eager to move from poem to poem to find out what would happen to the next character. What scene —be it a bar, a market, a cafe, or a friend’s garage—would roll out towards me and include me in its tragic beauty? One such poem is striking in its inclusion of the reader. Called “The Cycle”, it describes the relentlessness of everyday existence: “we are sucked up/ through elevators/ ...we are worms/ eating the world/ the bed throws us/ into the room/ the room throws us/ into the yard/ the yard into the street…” By the end of the poem we are all “bidding farewell/ climbing for light.” As we arrive at the last poem in the book, “The Consolation of Philosophy”, we are provided with a sort of benediction, soothing us despite our woes. Using the second person “you” voice, it consoles us with a summing up of an imperfect life so far, but ending with the prayerful: “bless you on your journey, / bless you in your optimism,/ bless you, and god’s speed—” It’s a voice that could be talking to themselves, a family member, you, or me, and it’s a voice that will stay with me a long time, inspired by its beauty. |
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About the Author:
Jessica Purdy teaches Poetry Workshops at Southern New Hampshire University. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems and reviews have appeared in many journals, including The Plath Poetry Project, The Ekphrastic Review, The Light Ekphrastic, SurVision, The Wild Word, isacoustic, Nixes Mate Review, Bluestem Magazine,The Telephone Game, The Tower Journal, and The Cafe Review, among others. Her chapbook, Learning the Names, was published in 2015 by Finishing Line Press. Her books STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House were both released by Nixes Mate Books consecutively, in 2017 and 2018.
Jessica Purdy teaches Poetry Workshops at Southern New Hampshire University. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems and reviews have appeared in many journals, including The Plath Poetry Project, The Ekphrastic Review, The Light Ekphrastic, SurVision, The Wild Word, isacoustic, Nixes Mate Review, Bluestem Magazine,The Telephone Game, The Tower Journal, and The Cafe Review, among others. Her chapbook, Learning the Names, was published in 2015 by Finishing Line Press. Her books STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House were both released by Nixes Mate Books consecutively, in 2017 and 2018.