"Count Four," Poems by Kieth Kopka

Count Four arrives as Kieth Kopka’s debut poetry collection; it contains some 32 pieces informed by working class struggles, and populated by the denizens of working class backwaters. Kopka turns a felicitous phrase on occasion, but overall this collection reads like flash fiction written in verse form. In seedy or shady or poverty-stricken circumstances, his characters strive to rise above the lots they have been handed; mostly there are no answers here, only disturbing questions.

Kopka does flash his torch on some very arresting juxtapositions: John Wayne the movie hero with John Wayne the cancer victim; stolen clothing piled high enough on a bed to reach a crucifix on a wall; Henry Ford and square dancing; accidentally running over a squirrel in the road and a faulty parking meter robbing the poet of time. These stark comparisons indicate if not a hopelessness, a  nagging doubt in the value of effort.

I found some truly memorable, and sometimes admirable, imagery here. In “Cold Pastoral” Kopka brings into the same short poem: a speaker combining the re-enactment of a Civil War battle and a desire to fix the landscape by driving a Zamboni machine. In “Monument” the poet’s character has been arrested for suspicion of arson and is beaten by a “chubby rookie” cop: “my compliant frame / absorbing each swing / of his nightstick, / until finally I, too, / start to take shape.”

In “Homecoming,” the speaker’s cousin Danny comes home for a family dinner wearing a blond wig and asking to be called Danielle. The first person narrator takes over doing the dishes and tosses Danielle a dish rag, inviting her to kitchen duty: “I lace my fingers into hers, and we plunge / them into the clogged basin, together pushing / through whatever remnants are left.”

Kopka truly has a poetic sensibility, especially a knack for yoking startlingly disparate elements into the service of a single clear message. There is a power here, certainly, however much one might wish for a more exalted diction.