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Book Reviews
Review by Lisa R. Davis Andrew Oerke’s African Stiltdancer is not a collection of poems, a travelogue, a journal, a confession, nor even the chronicles of a world citizen. This collection of consise, bare, and honest poems is a portal into a mythical Africa found real. Oerke’s tales of wanderings through our ideal wild country--and his real Africa--quickly bring us, the readers, alongside the narrator as he affirms nature’s resistance to our mortal projections: "Here’s a night in which I’m as good as blind./Even the stars in the phosphorous sky/are too remote for me to be blasphemous;" Our desire for political awareness: "Shell casings paved the streets like peanut shells;" And the romantic and universal discoveries of the lone traveler: "The moon is the only proof left of the sun." We are drawn in through rhythms and stories of those rhythms: "In the village in the village in the village/life repeats itself life undoes itself." The poems succumb to obvious rhymes only when necessary. The rhymes are often small surprises but prove to be necessary and satisfactory when studied: "She clings to me./I cling to her. We gallop now, then fly/as I drop her through slender years of sky/into womanhood where the mat is dry," Oerke uses bits of forms such as the sestet, couplet and haiku also when needed. This noncommittal use of form, refrain, rhythm, and rhyme creates a tension that I like to think reflects the frustration we experience if we try too hard to fit life to our own expectations. But that is just me fitting Oerke’s poetry to my own needs at the moment. Lost in my musings as the "camels flicker into and out of/the guttering firelight," I turn to my side but Mr. Oerke is long gone. He has already survived these improbabilities and moved on. His poems might be travel advisories for the heart carved in sand. They will be gone with the next rain and it will be my turn to stand alone under the "stars thick as wool." Read an excerpt from this book opens in new window About Andrew H. Oerke After suggesting the idea of the Peace Corps to Jerry Clark, John F. Kennedy’s campaign manager in Wisconsin, Andrew Oerke went on to become a Peace Corps Director in Africa and the Caribbean. He worked and visited in more than 160 countries, is a Golden Gloves champ, football player, university professor and Poet-in-Residence, consultant to the United Nations on the Gulf War, on financial services and on the environement. He was the recipient of the Fulbright scholarship at the Freie Universität in Berlin and studied under Mark Strand, by a scholarship at the University of Iowa writers’ workshop. His work has appeared frequently in The New Yorker, and Mr. Oerke has published seven books of poetry, a song-cycle and two operas. In 2003 and again in 2006, he’s been given the award for literature by the UN Society of Writers and Artists. He makes his home in Florida, and writes full time.  |
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