Chaos and Calm on the Frontier: The Poetry of Bob Savino

For Bob Savino, Poetry must always have the capital P. It is not a hobby or a vocation; it is not an accouterment or an attitude. It is a divinity possessing one's soul. Like the volatile Gods of ancient Greece, it sometimes sits quietly, marveling, and other times it rages feverishly. In either case, Savino's poetry commands; it grips the reader with its absolute intensity.

In Savino's aptly titled new book, Report from the Frontier, we indeed find ourselves in a war-zone, but not the war-zone of a dichotomy battling for his possessed soul. No, In this war, the poetry of quietude and rage are allied against an enemy of deadening pettiness: the pettiness of emotional inertia.

Nowhere is the call to arms more explicit than in the electric This Poem is Stalking You:

At the end of this Poem, Savino demands poetry that will seize us "by the throat, and [not] let go." And seized we are, with compulsion to hear, to see what barrages us, to comprehend it with exactitude, to liberate ourselves in clarity.

During moments like these, Savino's voice transcends, and we do not hear the Poet so much as a preternatural authority that is as irresistible as it is unflinching. Throughout Report from the Frontier, this voice assails and seizes us; his lines compel us to hear: "They're having babies in the sewers of Rumania", "nothingness is our primary condition", "Tell us once again how slaughter liberates the soul!", "I'm every child ever whipped in the tool shed", "you come back to this fabulous fumbling with words … even though you can never describe what ravishes your soul", "you can come to an edge of such perfect madness/there's no choice but to quiver awake like a wound".

At other times, which seem like moments of rest and interlude, Savino employs beauty and serenity to leave us equally defenseless. We join him as he discovers "dew beading on a spider's web" or "stumble[s] into Paradise", as he "enter[s] the earth, as cold as stones" only to "return with the banners of the grass", as he handles a letter "gingerly, as though it held a bomb" then opens it to find "the five splintered pieces of your smile", as "This exact instant thrills me, caressing like a lover". Savino, like the insistence of chaos on the frontier, is relentless. He provides no circumstance, whether natural or man-made, that does not call us to observe, comprehend and conceive. He drops us into a world with context and refuses to extract us until we've had a good look about. In this world we hear helicopters droning or "a scorpion hissing at the back of the closet", inhabit a mansion "built completely from the bones of Third World children" or lust for "the gold fillings from your teeth", eagerly demand a "bad-ass storm" ready to "bust my chops" or "pitiless cataracts of air", discover an asparagus fern "burst[ing] into flower" or "The intricacy of the silence framed by a snowflake".

The power of these images lays as much in their ubiquity as it does in their exactness. For better or worse, there is no quarter in Savino's world. All we need do is look about; something around us is sure to dispatch us into an awe-inspired moment of transcendence, if we only learn to react. For even at his bleakest, Savino can't help but offer a glimpse of redemption for those who will see.

Savino does not shy away from these momentous sentiments, but he embraces them without sentimentality. His Poems are unabashed yearnings for, and praises of, faith and truth, pain and loss, torment and death, ecstasy and majesty, the unknown, the infinite, the sacred, God and Love. In these, Savino finds the supremacy of the Poetic moment: the moment "you discover something sacred, something held in trust./You know what it is. You remember now."

All through Report from the Frontier, this moment of discovery and remembrance governs. It underlies the individual Poems and effects their success as a whole work. Even more so, it stands out as the fleeting moment of clarity, the culmination of human experience. Readers will find themselves privileged to share in this moment, hoping, as Savino writes in Learning My Song, that he is "not stopping this Poem here because it's over" but only because he's "just catching [his] breath, just learning [his] song …"