Buyer's Remorse
Roy Mash
Word Tech Communications
ISBN: 978-1625490513

Reviewer: Lee Rossi


          The white male poet is not dead. In fact, he's just been transferred from the ICU to the ambulatory wards where all the other poets, gay and lesbian, black, brown, and red, are recuperating from societal neglect. His near-death experience, however, has left him chastened, less given to self-important declarations and high-minded solipsism. He has become more gregarious, more humble, and more fun to be with. Think of Billy Collins or Tony Hoagland or Bob Hicok, or of West Coast writers like Steve Kowit and Ron Koertge—part philosopher, two parts comedian, they aspire to entertain the reader with their suburban yawp.

          With Buyer's Remorse, the Bay Area poet Roy Mash makes his own claim to inclusion in this jovial circle. Buyer's Remorse is a first book of considerable charm. Mash, who began writing poetry in high school but then took a forty-year hiatus, is an extreme example of Buddhist poet Peter Levitt's dictum that “even when you're not writing, you're writing.”

          Buyer's Remorse envelops us with a breadth of experience and a depth of understanding. Arranged in loose chronological order, the book begins with tales of childhood and adolescence and then graduates to adulthood, sexual relationships, and the practice of art. Throughout there is brashness and bravado, a strategy of excess. The ode, hyperbolic in its praise, is the characteristic mode of this book. “Cannonball,” which celebrates adolescent awkwardness, contrasts the erotics of skill with the brashness of exuberance. Not for him, says the speaker, “the God-shaped swan” nor “the jackknife// that released itself/ to slit the water like a lover's hand slipping/ into an open robe.” He prefers “the wrecking ball of the body/ cymbal-crash[ing]/ into the smug surface,/ depth charge churning/ in a blue flurry of bubbles.” The sexual charge of early adolescence is expended in innocent taunting, the boy declaring his “truth, starshot/ across a world smithereened with watery rubble/ and the shrieks of// poolside girls.”

          Other poems display a fascination with childhood's oversized fears and disappointments. We see the child anguishing over the lumbering approach of the Mummy, inexorable as death, and screaming with the girl kidnapped by the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Some honeymoon! Movies provide templates for grave existential and philosophical questions. “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” for example, is a parable of humility, of our shrinking sense of importance as we age:

I like to think he finally

resolved himself to falling,
to make a life of falling
down through the sweet infinite
divisibility of oblivion.

          And yet the poet is not afraid to plumb the terrors of childhood, as he muses on a boy trapped in an abandoned refrigerator, the poem spooling backwards from the title through despair and panic to the initial moment of childish wonder: “that instant of whispered glee, that one/ heart surge of delight and exultation” when the boy realizes, as the title tells us, “They'll never find me here.”

          “Love of Slapstick,” on the other hand, expresses the poet's reverence for the mawkish, clumsy, genial brutality of childhood:

No sadism this, no black desire,
Just Larry, Moe, and Curly's woes,
the thousand gouges that conspire                
to make the milk come out my nose.

          We notice not only the gentle send up of Hamlet's “to be or not to be” soliloquy (no doubt this boy would rather be than not be), but also the skillful handling of the rhymed tetrameter quatrain.

          Youthful bravado is one side of the coin, adult reserve the other. In “Mt. Tamalpais” the poet contrasts the grandeur of nature with his own pedestrian life:

Its slopes are drawn into an unmistakable frown,
expressive of its disappointment with my…
my raggy pup tent of a life.

          And yet this contemporary Metaphysical also displays a firm sense of masculine competence. He apostrophizes his “Wallet” thusly:

Little loner, you –
     little black
paladin of identity,
     how deftly
the twenties slide
     into place,
weathered lovers
     edging
into a leathered bed.

          We notice again his interest in form as well as his sonic curiosity.

          Yet if death violates the privileged sanctum of childhood, it is never far from the older man. Consider, for example, “Sky Mall,” Mash's wonderful meditation on mortality and consumerism, in which the poet makes explicit the link between fear of death and the pathological consumerism of our age:

Now that the air has become a pavement
of potholes, the fuselage a chew toy
for the gods,…
never before have I so wanted these things…

          As the poem progresses “these things” become more and more ridiculous: “An upside down tomato garden…an inflatable electric piano…the collection of Lincoln pennies/ with the rare 1943 steel cent.” At the end of the poem we hear the poet praying to “drift off in flannel/ footed pajamas,/ as a beige belt/ sends gentle, slimming current/ to my midriff.”

          Whatever his themes, serious or not so serious, Mash displays a playful interest in form, which lightens the tone. He's not embarrassed at pouring his new wine into old bottles. We find haiku, quatrains, and sonnets, as well as other nonce or ad hoc formal strategies. Here in its entirety is the fractured sonnet “Synopsis,” a comment on Shelley's “Ozymandias”:

Shelley's famous
diss shows
Ozymandias hapless
as dust
his ruckus
past his
bust bust

headless heedless
sans hands
sand's face
he's ghost
he's toast

he's
us

          He takes a similarly deflationary approach in “Shock,” a haiku only part joke, inflected with California Buddhism.

The first time someone
     called me “Sir” I looked around –
nobody was there

          He's also a man who knows how to turn a pun into a poem. “Mate,” for instance, is an oblique examination of romantic longing as seen through the prism of chess. He wants, he says, “a woman who knows// how to dominate the long diagonal,/ her dark bishop/ laying siege to my little house of pawns.” And yet he will also praise the casual graces of long domesticity, as in “Anti-Aubade” in which the lovers don't have to part at daybreak, but can sleep all morning, “Facing outward, our bodies just touching.” He admits that “We might almost be dead,…done with desires,” yet even with their fires banked there still remains “the imperceptible nudging,/ The sweet, lingering kiss of our behinds.”

          Honesty and humility are just two of the virtues celebrated in this wonderful book ringing with tones of compassion. Like his hero Lavoisier (“Two Saints of Clarity”), guillotined during the Terror, we need thoughtfulness and “curiosity, peering out,/ unperturbed, above the rushing blood.” Now that the new pope is showing more interest in other religions, maybe an agnostic like me can propose a haphazardly observant Jew like Roy Mash for fast-track canonization. We can always use another patron saint of clarity.