Review: That Special Something

Finding Folly in the Finitude
Review: That Special Something

Dimitrius A. DeMarco

John Popielaski
​Poetry
Sheila-Na-Gig pp. 118
Cost: $17.00

In some way or another, we are all caught in our own modern minutia, marching to the tune of a drum that is beaten for us like eggs in a Sunday scramble. People crave escape. People crave reprieve. People crave a difference in the daily, to either be or see something remarkable, or simply to remark at the unremarkable, and experience joy in a way that can only be described as simple, but special.
​
John Popielaski’s poetry collection That Special Something is a home-brewed, hand-poured draft, best enjoyed on the porch with the sweet, harmonic melody of nature playing in the background. Popielaski trades the business and bustle of our constructed world for the serene scenes of running water in a stream and the cigar smoke in dive bars; the smell of hops and cracked corn; and the sounds of crickets, American toads, and the holy rise and fall of breathing.

The primary achievement of Popielaski’s collection is the ultimate marriage of startlingly simplistic, specific, and immediate images with an overwhelming thematic depth bubbling below the surface. His lines ground the reader in comfortable familiarity, all the while engaging them in an existential, intellectual marathon. The result? A peculiar, albeit effective blend of storm-tossed, gallows-tinged humor and weighty considerations, where laughter is the only reflex to a rather unsettling set of truths. ​

Take for example the poem “Vastness and the Theme of Inescapability,” where the speaker opens the poem with: “the sort of beer I drink is better / in a shapely glass” (lines 1-2) which is a rather inconspicuous and harmless description of an ordinary object. Popielaski then cascades the pouring of his favorite hop-heavy beverage into a larger discussion of BPA and Glyphosate and their effects on male vitality:

sitting ...
in this cushioned Adirondack chair, sipping
a local eight-percenter ...
as I observe a mother
sparrow teaching her buoyant young
to pick and eat the peppergrass seeds.
​(lines 51-55)

It is in this rhetorically employed dichotomic dance of simplicity and depth—running all the way from the title to the poem’s end—that Popielaski unveils his ultimate commentary: we can have a good time living by finding folly in the finitude of dying.

A major part of Popielaski’s technique is his syntactic structures, his lyrical, prosaic, frankly conversational style aids in lulling the reader into that sense of simplicity—particularly in the usage of imagery and sensory details. The poem “About This Business of Deserving” is rich with this tactic, and begins by placing the speaker in a state of contemplation:

One day you realize that you've outlived
a lot of people, children, countless animals,
trees even, all of whom on that day seem
to have deserved duration more than you (lines 1-4)

The speaker then “kicks back” and begins looking at comfortable images of leaves, clouds, trees and toads, then juxtaposing them with existential commentary of “deserving” life, particularly a longer one to that of those trees, animals, children, or:​

the pair of American toads
run over in front of the tilted mailbox
in the thunderstorm last night
after how many hot days without a drop of rain ...
how glorious the downpour must have felt before the headlights bore down (lines 38-41, 45)

The verse and the nature of the speaker's quandary calls the reader to engage with those simple, everyday images, and evokes a significant depth of emotion and a sympathetic response towards things we otherwise wouldn’t look twice at. It is here that Popielaski’s conversation continues, and the reader is again left questioning, just as the speaker was in the poem.

Popeliaski then brings this effect to a fast-poured head in the title poem, “That Special Something.” Placed at the start of the collection, the speaker wakes in a tent, relieves himself, then heads to the water to collect and process in what is an extraordinary expression of ordinariness. Popielaski juxtaposes this with the image of a life: ​

where you will move
from cubicle to cubicle
and sip drip coffee,
fret about such silly things
as thread counts
or the mail (lines 29-34)

The poem is an exploration of imposter syndrome in the natural setting that Popielaski builds, where ultimately the speaker entertains “rebellion” in the form of daring to “sabotage the turbine / for the windmill that’s to be / erected on the ridge ahead” (lines 55-57). Ultimately, the speaker knows that he won’t, as “subversion isn’t in you / and your parents didn’t raise you / to give up yourself” (lines 60-62). This internal conflict and fledgling rebellion quickly snuffed in the stage of embers speaks to the nature of something we all struggle with while living in society: the subtle destruction and little injuries we inflict both on the world and ourselves in the name of “progress.”

Popielaski’s poetry collection is a culmination of experience, and the rich, composted nature of a life that both understands and accepts, yet can’t help but covertly “rage against the dying of the light” and the mad machine that churns us round and out the door each morning. That Special Something reminds us to stop, to reflect, to remember our fathers, and our history, to smell the roses (or more accurately, the native flora) and to drink your fill without fear of chemicals. Popielaski calls to us from over the white picket fences and across the asphalt, and makes a genuine, yet measured appeal to readers to think with their hearts and feel with their heads, and ultimately cautions us not to “grumble with a sigh,” but to take in a long slow drag of gratitude instead, to burst out in a heart-healthy dose of laughter, and to “grin as though we have nothing to lose.”