Roland Flint beckons in a voice inclusive and reassuring to come see the everyday world. In Easy, Flint speaks of gratitude for whatever is good, true, and simple, though one suspects such gratitude is not simply or easily acquired. There is a gentleness, if not always in the subjects of these poems then in their telling, and in their reception.
“What is laughter to cure cancer? / or to surprise a darkness like grief / so that you guiltily clap your mouth?” (“Haha”). “If the colors of spring are no / brighter, as to Williams’s widow, / they are no less bright, or fine / to me, despite my sorrowing, / seeing them, you are gone” (“Tom”). Flint’s fluid penetration of diverse people and matters―manual laborers, the next-door neighbor teaching his son to ride a bike, Allen Tate, cooking, gardening, marriage, popular culture, the link/rivalry between laughter and sex, poetry itself―does not descend to the mysterious, difficult, or esoteric; people and life, pure and simple, yield bald-faced truths and exquisite riches of insight enough.
In the title poem, the dancelike synchronizations of a middle-aged couple preparing dinner together reveal a comfortableness with and practiced knowledge of each other. They may during dinner, Flint writes, “hold hands a moment, almost like a handshake / by now, most friendly, confirming the contract. . . . She is a pretty woman of 51, who has / kept herself trim and fit. / He is 56 and hasn’t.” They “will talk a long time” of many things, including “how / easy it is, the times like this, when it’s simple.” Implied, of course, are darker, conflicted times that make such acceptance and appreciation real. Flint’s welcome message is that the flipside of timeworn is smooth.
In “Flower,” mockery turns to self-mocking as the poet describes civic club businessmen “whose business is to aluminize / anything―even a rose: which is, / sort of, what you did right back, / for a fat fee, at the Rotary lunch, / bootlegging poetry in by limerick, / from innocent suggestives to / the bawdily ambiguous to / a fully aluminized rose.” Flint’s “Prayer,” though, offers thanks “. . . for eagerness, / Almost daily, to greet the drone / With words, bequeathed in part / By what poets before have done: / He prays to be among them, one, / However small. The work is all.” Easy is a marvelous work: lyrical gems of honest and wry delight in what we mistake as commonplace.
