The award-winning poet Andrew Demčak is not a household name.  Yet.  But he is assembling a body of poetry that intends for him to become one of the important voices of his generation.  His poems shift like water weeds, now quiet and almost elegiac, now frighteningly intense; now comforting, now terrible in the arc of their stories.  At the same time they are crystalline and shadowed, bitter and loving.  A young Californian (just 41), and gay, he writes elliptically but movingly out of his own experience and on broader themes.  Unlike some poets, whose eyes are turned ever inward, he participates in the world around him while observing acutely.  Although he has been publishing for a decade or more, his bound work is limited to these two books plus two chapbooks.  Still, the quality of his work has brought him not only awards but inclusion in college courses on contemporary writers.

His two most recent volumes reached me about a month ago, and I will admit that I’ve been rationing them, not always moving forward, sometimes jumping back several poems to work my way to deeper understanding before progressing.  It is not easy to distill into a brief review what it is that moves me in his writing.  Certainly, there is the nakedness of serious self-questioning, but that is not usually attractive to me as a reader, so the quality of his work must lie in some other aspect, perhaps the absolute rightness of each phrase, whether in a formal volume like Catching Tigers in Red Weather, or a less deliberately constructed but no less compelling collection like Zero Summer.

From Catching Tigers, a sample of the slow, deadly balancing act of his formal writing:

Gulliver

Encircled by Lilliputian shot
glasses, thirst tied me down, fixing me on

petty fetters, an inchworm against this
distant, unfillable abyss.  Having

tasted from several flagons in 12-step
boots.  Pissing my worth in many fires.

Brobdingnag distant as sobriety.
Readied flask swift to my lips, my tongue

revolving in its shadow.  Reflections
unattached from sipping pools.  A drunk

begun, holding fast.  The iciness of
my psyche decanted into a glass.

And from Zero Summer, an example of the less formal but not less powerful thrust of poems that seem inspired by the Zen writers of mediaeval Japan:

Other Pursuits

I stood like a dress form in the hall
while you secured every argument

costumed
the pattern of your leaving
its sidelong veneer of blame

I writhed
solemnly
on the velvet pin cushion

I couldn’t explain the fraying of seams
fallen hems
the suit of our history –
something
a little bit like Medea’s?

didn’t I button
and unbutton you
and collect
every mysterious thread?

I suppose now
that it’s unimportant
the tailor has gone thimble-blind
too soon
his angry stitches
sewn across the moon

The structural formality of Catching Tigers was initially helpful for me in digesting these two books, but that should not be taken as a recommendation to others to begin with that volume necessarily.  I have always been a very fast reader when consuming prose, and found the severe construction an aid because it forced me to slow my pace to his deeper meanings.  Those who are more accustomed to the quicksilver of modern poets will not be as challenged as I was initially; their reward will consequently be both larger and more immediate. 

I am really grateful for the introduction these two books gave me to Demčak’s writing.  I think many of our readers will be as moved, as challenged, as impressed as I was.

Catching Tigers in Red Weather, Three Candles Press, 2007; $14.95; ISBN 978-0-9770892-3-9
Zero Summer, BlazeVOX [books], 2009 $16.00; ISBN 978-1-935402-07-7