Book Reviews
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"Blind Date With Cavafy" by Steve Fellner
by Tony Leuzzi
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Steve Fellner’s Blind Date with Cavafy is an accomplished collection of poems that balances humor and sadness with surprising agility and grace. Like a pro athlete, Fellner’s deceptively breezy, witty tone seems as effortless as breathing, but don’t be fooled: beneath the shticky, deadpan humor, poems like “Synesthesia” (where the narrator’s brother dolls out absurd compliments, such as when he critiques his mother’s new dress as “The sound of a waterfall doing the jitterbug with a harem of robins”) dip deep into wells of loneliness and alienation. Poem after poem is beaded together with a surprising mix of erudition and popular culture. One is as likely to find references to literary criticism (“Criticism”) alongside a tongue-in-cheek examination of identity politics (“Homosexuality is not a Theme”); Madonna appears (“The Aesthetics of the Damned”), as does Catullus (“I Hate You, Too, Catullus”); and Degas’s sketches are referenced (“Miss La La”) in the same book as a Service Merchandise humidifier (“Clearing the Air”). But all of this is unified by Fellner’s elastic intelligence, his ironic and playful sensibility. What’s more, he does not shy from the more troubling aspects of our world. In “Self Portrait,” the book’s centerpiece, Fellner strings together a strange but compelling mosaic of memories and impressions, with an occasional overt statement. “Homosexuality is my choice. I wanted/childlessness” he says in a concise section, which is then followed by a confession: “Once I had sex with a woman. I already knew/I was gay. She knew I was gay. But/we were bored.” The tone might seem casual, even disaffected, but these deftly-lineated lines suggest the couples’ experiment is rooted in desperation, dramatizing the lengths they will go to find meaning in experience. Another theme explores how one faces emptiness while others content themselves with having achieved sham revelations. If in “Epiphanies” Fellner’s persona states outright that “Everyone was having them,” by the third stanza he says, “I waited for my epiphany. I tried to be patient.” Contrary to expectation, he doesn’t experience one. Rather, the poem opens as it “closes” with a series of devastatingly honest questions. There is, indeed, much good to say of this book—including its effective satirical sting; but read it for yourself and discover where and why the author insists, “miracles are nothing/more than accidents we like.”
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