Book Review: Many full hands applauding inelegantly

       'Many full hands applauding inelegantly', by Darren C. Demaree, is a book of poems written from the center, how light enters a room usually from an angle, these poems, instead begin from the middle of the room and slowly find the jagged angles where light collects, giving form to the dust, the unseen of our lives. As the opener "A VIOLENT SOUND IN ALMOST EVERY PLACE #1" puts it "I gave up smoking so that there would be one less way to find me, but I failed first to erase the constellation of good, trained ears." Darren subtly maps out the peripheral contours of human life, its ease and dis-ease, the collected bits and pieces of daily living, like a strong hand reaching deep into cold waters and pulling out the warm underbelly of a river, these works deliver themselves on a level that has much to offer, if you listen closely you can hear the chime of a resonant heart in motion, it is a life force on the move in each of these poems.

      "We were not sentenced, we were gifted these trials by the perfect number on the perfect day. We are the most beautiful fraction & every effort to delay or count differently weighs the sky down, pushes it harder against our thickened chest." This is what I mean by working from the middle, the center of things, grafting meaning's deepest pull onto the skin, every poem here has something to teach, in the musical sense, how notes operate by leaning into each other, the painful but perfect fit of chord after chord, the ear learns it because the heart already knows it.

       "We are sewn beauty", Darren writes, "that does not mean we cannot meet the oil and the orphan of our star's best intentions, that we exist, that our hearts are soft enough for real magic to become planted in each of our bones." It's almost as if we are listening to a phone conversation between Charles Simic and Jorie Graham, the surreal and the salvific all at once rushing through and filling the room with linguistic light.

       One doesn't walk away from this book, one walks towards it. And having seen what lies inside, stitched across each page, pulsing with life and all of the jagged undersides of the unseen, the unspoken, one can't help but applaud, with the many full hands of the human heart.



*Many Full Hands Applauding Inelegantly is published by 8th House Publishing and set to be released in November/December.

visit darrencdemaree.com/