JACK AND JILL IN TROY
by Bob Perelman
Bob Perelman’s latest book, Jack and Jill in Troy, makes use of the rapid clarity of Homer and the elemental incantations of nursery talk to create a compelling array of poems that speak to our present moment with tragic humor and urgent, skeptical directness.
A rather R-rated version of Jack and Jill appear in some poems, as if a worldly-wise Mother Goose is addressing young and old in the same breath. In other poems the world of the Iliad appears—permanent war economy, never-finished gender negotiations, continual power disputes, absolute hierarchies arbitrarily enforced—but both these nursery matters and the ancient epic trappings are brought forward to provide a wide-angle frame onto our own situation.
The poems in Jack and Jill in Troy are immediately legible, suggestive, and surprising.
TACT IN TROY
In the early twenty-first century
we’re still finding out about our miraculous powers
amid this jumbled crowd of hulking buildings,
ton upon ton of exquisitely priced brick,
chrome spun almost too fine to see,
the entire weight of this exacting knowledge
so easy for our miracle bombs to blow up,
which everybody knows but has presents to get
and other friendly things to do
because we like each other as much as ever.
People are saying:
The Iliad again. Really? Booyah! Why all this repetition? Well isn’t that the big question wherever you look? Did Bob say that? No. Maybe. His voice got in my head. You’ll see. This book puts quasi-historical time slapdash up against the present. The effect is dizzying. But the Iliad and Jack and Jill? Someone’s gotta climb this hill. Why? The gods say so. Who are the gods? You know. The 1% with their access to special effects. And now it’s time for the war to begin again. This book hurts. I love it. - Rae Armantrout
Bob Perelman in Jack and Jill in Troy writes in an apparently easy, conversational diction that can shift into and out of a lyric mode and slip sideways into narration, bringing us the age-old stories in such bright, human detail that they seem to unfold in our own backyards. Odd conjunctions of ancient and modern, aspects of the contemporary (even within one line) startle us into a new view of our now less familiar world. Bitter passion, or anger, makes way for a broader compassion, a thoughtful wry humor. But it is the pervasive intelligence and rhythmic clarity of the speaking voice, at once deeply informed and by choice informal, that makes Jack and Jill in Troy such a good and enlightening companion. - Lydia Davis
Perelman writes from an intimate and knowing distance, and it turns out that the Greeks and the gods and all their problems and the pair with the pail are as familiar as our own lives, vexed and startling. - Alan Bernheimer
About the author:
Bob Perelman is the author of 14 poetry collections, including Iflife, Virtual Reality, The First World and Ten to One: Selected Poems. He collaborated with his wife, the painter Francie Shaw, on Playing Bodies. His latest critical book is Modernism the Morning After. He taught at UPenn for 25 years and now lives in Berkeley.