Review of UNANSWERED CALLS: A Book of Poems (Larry Rubin), "Rattling the Academy"

Author: Larry Rubin

Title: Unanswered Calls: a Book of Poems

Paperback: 67 pages

Publisher: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company (January 1997)

ISBN: 0787243760

Price: $12.00

Rating: Five Stars

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Rattling the Academy

Georgia poet Larry Rubin does not shout; he whispers, whispers reverberating as the reader dips into Unanswered Calls: a Book of Poems. These quiet, wry poems cut to the root of a life fully lived with a promise of more years to come.

Rubin, a lover of Emily Dickinson and a contemporary of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Anne Sexton, was born on Valentine's Day, 1930. A life-long bachelor, he taught at Georgia Tech for 44 years, retiring in 1999. A Fulbright Scholar and recipient of the Smith-Mundt Award from the U.S. State Department, Rubin has traveled extensively, both domestically and abroad.

The poet offers a secret slice of his world--but only that sliver needed for universal understanding. Many of the poems, tinged with overtones of past, present, and impending death, are part love, part wistful, and part disappointed, addressed or directed to the speaker's mother, father, sister, friends, and other poets. Some are travel poems; yet others sling humorous darts at the publishing industry.

This collection is divided into six parts: "Growing Up on the Beach," "Cracking the Coffin," "Between My Stainless Sheets," "Rattling the Bones," "Information Based Upon a Memo Leaked by Our Sources, and "Lunging Toward Light." In organizing this collection, the poet has clearly contemplated his own mortality.

The reader will not find so-called "edgy" experimental poems here, but, rather, well-crafted work with soulfulness and clear surface meaning.

It is the subtext which offers up surprises. In "The Son, Condemned," the speaker describes a failed and physically painful telephone connection with his father during a thunderstorm. On the surface, the poem depicts a literal image of nature trumping technology, but also intimating a complicated relationship between a father and son:

"And his voice does not get through/....This night all rods are wired to his revenge:/ He wanted grandsons forged in chains of light/And now he'll spot the withered link, and strike"--echoes of Emily Dickinson's "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass" poem.

In "At the Birth of My First Child," a Jewish father laments to his son, who is not likely to continue the family's lineage:

"I gave the essence of my self,/ I gave what I could give. I tried./ Still not enough. My son, you'll die."

The bachelor son yet again disappoints the father, depriving him of his due immortality.

Rubin reveals the surfaces of his life, but unlike many of his contemporaries, he never confesses anything definitively--one will not find embarrassing moments splashed across the page, although the poems in "Between My Stainless Sheets" hint of a life experienced fully. In "Registered at the Bordello Hotel (Vienna)," the speaker concludes,

"By dawn all rooms are empty/ Between my stainless sheets/ I sleep in the sweat of a single heart."

In "Lines for a Poet, After Her Shock Treatments," Rubin addresses a Plath-esque character who is caught in the cultural gender gap of the 1950's:

"You squint at me/ And smile in the phantom way of girls/ Uncertain of their escort to the prom./ Tentative, you wait for dreams to pass,..."

One gets the sense that the confessional poets, as they sling the muck of their lives all over the world stage, bewilder Rubin as he goes about creating vivid links between his past and present.

Rubin seems to have forged a literary connection with Emily Dickinson, an outsider poet during her lifetime. Some of Rubin's poems echo Dickinson's style and offer a male counterpart to her voice. In "Growing Up on the Beach," the speaker begins,

"Always the waters waiting/ Just beyond the wall--/ Always the lifeguards listening/ For cries of the final call."

Like his literary heroine, Larry Rubin has been vastly undervalued as a poet of note. The poet recognizes his lack of recognition in "The Editors," who have dismissed the speaker's work as obsessive and having a "morbid concern with death." The speaker says,

"They preferred concern with squirrels/ And spring, and mating habits along suburban/ Lakes, mustard seeds and pearls, and little/ Boats that row around the Cape."

In 2006, "The Editors" may very well be thirty-year-old owners of online journals, in search of the mating habits of gangsta rappers.

Rubin incorporates his travel into his poetry; a confirmed aviophobic, the poet continues to sail when he travels to Europe. In his travel descriptions, he captures the loneliness of temporary displacement:

"Once the wharf moves backwards...,/ And laws of the land fade toward that curve/ Horizon draws,/ The waves are bunched into bouquets,/ One vast flower of the sea;/ The passengers glide along the deck/ And speak to break the outer silences/ Crystallizing in the vacuum."

Clarity of surface is the hallmark of Larry Rubin's poetry. At the yearly conference of the College English Association (CEA), Rubin facilitates a poetry workshop in which he stresses the concept of the "simple" surface meaning as a vital and necessary element of poems.

One cannot just read Unanswered Calls; these poems must be experienced through the lens of the speaker, Larry Rubin himself, and his fascinating life. These poems, by virtue of their non-trendiness, will outlast much of the "relevant" work coming out of M.F.A. programs today.

If you can find this book, grab it, and never let it slip out of your life.

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Reference: Literature: Larry Rubin (b. 1930)

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