{"id":3104,"date":"2013-08-19T13:47:44","date_gmt":"2013-08-19T13:47:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=3104"},"modified":"2016-01-23T18:10:26","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T17:10:26","slug":"dore-kiesselbach-salt-pier-university-of-pittsburgh-press-reviewed-by-james-reith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=3104","title":{"rendered":"Dore Kiesselbach, Salt Pier<\/em>, (Pittsburgh UP) $15.95 reviewed by James Reith."},"content":{"rendered":"

With a title that simultaneously evokes the seaside, industry and a condiment, Salt Pier isn\u2019t a volume trying to launch fireworks on its title page; something which its beige and seemingly rusting cover doesn\u2019t help to dispel. A quick search of the title on Google, however, almost solely returns a popular diving spot on the Caribbean Island of Bonaire, a far cry from the twee Americana I had anticipated. This experience, in part, works as a nice analogy for what reading Salt Pier is like: Something seemingly familiar starts to unravel upon investigation. In fact, this is even mimicked in that aforementioned cover: Far from being the weathered wall of a port warehouse, the image is, in fact, an aerial photograph of a salt pond, something which you need only look on the volume\u2019s back page to discover. <\/p>\n

Kiesselbach himself, in \u2018Winter Reeds\u2019, offers a fairly neat summary of his style: \u2018Casual study grown\/ intense, then forensic\u2019. And how casual that initial study is: His poetry is presented in neat descending columns, has a keen focus on both nature and the domestic and even seems to have a nice little narrative running throughout it involving a difficult relationship between parents and children \u2013 so far, so standard. What makes Salt Pier fascinating is that Kiesselbach never quite breaks this sense of familiarity; instead, he either toys conceptually with it from the inside or, as is the case of the volume\u2019s opening poem, he lets some strange image or observation momentarily bob up, only to let it sink back into the familiar again. In Salt Pier\u2019s starting poem \u2018a deer\/ leaves a footprint\u2026 under the box elder\u2019 which Kiesselbach studies. This investigation, however, then leads us to:<\/p>\n

Speechless lips pressed
\nInto snow if man was not
\nAlready the beast
\nThat walks on its mouth.<\/p>\n

The awkward syntax and imagery of this stanza is made all the more fascinating by its stemming from what initially sounded like an unremarkable nature poem. In contrast to drawing the strange out of the commonplace, you then have a poem like \u2018Magnifying Glass\u2019 in which the seemingly cruel act of burning ants is aestheticised to the point of seeming profound: Whilst being burnt, the ants \u2018pause as if considering\/ a huge question\/ coming from within\u2019, their bodies (though never referred to as such) moved by the wind \u2018the way leaves blow\/ across the surface\/ of a frozen lake.\u2019 Cruelty to insects is treated with the kind of delicacy with which one might\u2019ve expected the deer\u2019s hoof print to receive, the clich\u00e9d image of leaves in the wind helping to enforce Kiesselbach\u2019s quiet reversal of the familiar. <\/p>\n

Kiesselbach is also capable of bringing dark comedy into his investigations of the everyday, such as in \u2018Apology\u2019 where a mother tells her children that they were \u2018more fun than\/ a barrelful of monkeys\u2019 to which the speaker replies \u2018For whom is such\/ a monkey fun?\u2019 A barrel can, however, \u2018hold\/ emptiness\u2026 can hold dread.\u2019 Here even common idioms, upon close examination, can hold a sense of dread. <\/p>\n

Dore Kiesselbach is certainly not a poet of bombast, but this topsy-turvy treatment of well trodden subject matter exposes the potential strangeness lurking behind everyday occurrences. His knowingly clich\u00e9d treatment of otherwise neglected subjects, on the other hand, reinforces suspicions about the effect of presentation and the importance of engaging critically with the familiar. Perhaps the greatest achievement of Salt Pier, however, is that it manages to do all this whilst also seeming (mostly) fit for a church reading group; his own poetry operating much like his chosen subjects.
\n 
\nJames Reith<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With a title that simultaneously evokes the seaside, industry and a condiment, Salt Pier isn\u2019t a volume trying to launch fireworks on its title page; something which its beige and seemingly rusting cover doesn\u2019t help to dispel. A quick search of the title on Google, however, almost solely returns a popular diving spot on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nDore Kiesselbach, Salt Pier, (Pittsburgh UP) $15.95 reviewed by James Reith. - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=3104\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Dore Kiesselbach, Salt Pier, (Pittsburgh UP) $15.95 reviewed by James Reith. - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"With a title that simultaneously evokes the seaside, industry and a condiment, Salt Pier isn\u2019t a volume trying to launch fireworks on its title page; something which its beige and seemingly rusting cover doesn\u2019t help to dispel. 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