A note to begin: I am uncomfortable giving a review to a general readership about a book designed for a highly specialized audience. However the book is marketed to everyone as poetry, so I will try to be useful to both groups.
James Joyce’s Ulysses has been listed as the book that most people say they have read but they haven’t. I’d be willing to bet Moby Dick would be a close second. There is a reason for this.
Artists of all sorts play a game with their audience. They hide a nugget of wisdom in a stream of entertainment and challenge us to find it. The extension of this game that academics play is to ignore the entertainment and focus completely on the challenge. Joyce wrote Ulysses with the expressed purpose of keeping that game going for centuries.
And now Steve Mentz has taken it one step further; he has written a work of art about another work of art. Another layer of obfuscation on top of the original, which was opaque enough to send average readers fleeing to a Cozy Mystery or Rom-Com.
This book is touted as a narrative in poetry, but I noted precious little of either. It is poetry only in the narrow sense of present academic trends, containing little of the emotional enjoyment provided by traditional techniques. Stylistically there is a pleasant flow to the writing, and some of the imagery is powerful. In those rare places where meaning surfaces, the material is quite enjoyable.
However, this book is designed for academic puzzle solvers, and even at that level, I’m not completely in tune with the poet’s interpretation of the original prose.
The lack of Ahab’s presence in the first three-quarters of the original book leads some readers to wonder how much of the drive in the epic comes from the other characters. One might posit that the original novel is not about a monomaniac. Moby Dick is a book about the crew and their occupation. In the present political climate, when we read a book that is so old, it is ironic to find a group of people using the monomania of a leader to explain their deplorable actions. So, if Ahab’s mania is not the thematic crux of the book, one wonders at the point of reworking it by taking him out completely.
Thematically, I am suspicious of any book of poetry that requires ten pages of explanation from the author and seven pages of introduction by someone else before you start reading, and twenty more pages of similar material at the end. I prefer that a work of art stand on its own, instead of hiding its meaning in so much artistry that it disappears.
For example, Mentz uses Melville’s trick of naming people by their first initial and a period. He applies this to his narrator, as in “My head ached and I. could not sleep.” I found this misuse of a common convention a constant hiccup in my smooth reading of the poetry. The occasional switching of “I.” between first and third person makes it even more distracting. I have spent seventy years stopping at every period when I read. I’m not likely to change my reading habits on the whim of somebody trying to be artistic.
Bottom line: First, don’t read this book if you haven’t read Moby Dick (I went back and re-read it to write this review). Second, if you enjoy the Academic Puzzle game, read it; there is plenty to discuss, and Melville and Joyce will be applauding from their graves. Finally, if you want to enjoy reading poetry, go somewhere else.
4 stars