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Chapbook Reviews

Tardi, Mark. Airport music. Milwaukee, WI: Bronze Skull, 2005.

Submitted by David Pavelich

There is, at the outset of Mark Tardi’s chapbook Airport music, an address to the reader. Or if not the actual reader then a fictional reading character that only materializes by way of the opening line: “Nothing will absolve you of yourself.”

This first poem is an epistle – as are the third and sixth – which is reminiscent of Tardi’s earlier series “Peter Kaplan Sequence” in his 2003 book Euclid Shudders (Litmus Press). But what draws the reader to these three letters is the absence of any “Peter,” any obvious recipient, to the degree that the recipient is ourselves, finally. These singular moments lead the reader to use what he or she learns there in order to approach the more disjunctive poems in the chapbook, which offer less accessible answers.

A better word than “disjunctive” might be “dysfunctional.” Many of Tardi’s lines simply refuse their own resolution, and they fight against confidence. Dependent clauses are cut free from their syntax: “To your desolate without,” “On the spindle side,” “To pitch, to interior.” “Softball without gloves.”

Tardi’s poems exist within a society of people, of buildings and trains, of behaviors. The people live and outrageously die; the city’s grid is “sewn together” into an uneasy matrix of streets and hotels, rooms and low basements. On top of everything is the resolute difference in the people on the grid: “Some people like to go to church, and some people like cherries.” A deep divide in ethos, an “illegible math,” an ailing algebra that continues to function but does so on its own devices, invisibly, and without justification.

Tardi’s recent work promises that Euclid Shudders was not a statement of style, but a point from which his creative rays have begun. For the future, his not-so-“clean geometries” provocatively balance the elements that were held separate in the earlier work. One can be happily convinced that there is more from Tardi “lying in wait.”