(Blue Press Books, 2007)

C alifornia shines throughout these poems. Given that a locale chooses a poet as much as the poet chooses the locale, Opstedal’s poems reflect the California beach scene back on itself: “the mist of all those abandoned parking lots strung/out along the coast like dark pearls shimmering” (“In Seeming Waves Returning”). Imbedded in the lines is constant longing for a landscape which never existed, yet in the imaginations of parking lot wandering youth in self-isolation, thrives.

If ever there is to be a Californian poem for the post-baby boomer generations, Opstedal has defined it. He defies the shadow of Bukowski’s So Cal genre short line bark of coarse barroom bravado and stays far away from the washed-out post-Beat North Beach scene of San Francisco. Instead he rushes out, as if into the waves, board in hand, full long into a poetic merger of Keats and Hart Crane stranded on the rocks of Jeffers’ Big Sur motif: “Silk, amber, incense, dope—/‘Once is enough but maybe we should try one more time just to be sure’/The hard cold truth of constellations & tide/if we were to walk out to the edge of all of this/I wonder if we could” (“Think Again”). Head by way of heart to the line; the poems shine.

Opstedal encapsulates what the West Coast is all about. Noir and eerie, sparkling and bright, an all-night drive down the coast, pulling into the beach parking lot at dawn lighting up a cigarette to watch the surfers arrive. “My own diagnosis is grief plucking at the main-stem/as somewhere there is a total eclipse or total/collapse I’m not sure which” (“Vibrating Waves…”). A poetry of surfaces embedded with the insight of a lost stranger glimpsing the familiar: “Wind in the palm tree/like pages turning/in dreams speaking/dream language” (“Poet-in-Residence”).