Book Review: ‘The Underwater Typewriter’

The Underwater Typewriter

By Marc Zegans

Pelekinesis (Sept. 25, 2015)

136 pages, $22.95

It is always a pleasure to be asked to review a collection of poems by a poet whose work I greatly admire, and to find myself reading and rereading “The Underwater Typewriter” adds to the enjoyment.

Marc Zegans is a poet who immerses us ,in the face of cruelty, coercion, chance, betrayal and loss, in a sense of honest grace. And as the great poet Basil Bunting wrote, “Poetry, like music needs to be heard,” and Marc’s poems sing off the page, out into our ever expanding universe.

“The Underwater Typewriter” is a book full of marvels in which Zegans sees the world, as if for the first time, in everyday moments like Coffee, to the honesty found in Withdrawal and the humor lapping a smile on our faces in A Hipster Retires.

This collection of poems becomes a travel guide into our own complicated psyche, his words traveling across this great continent like a piece of lost luggage, destined to end up at the steps of Ithaca. His freshness of vision and freedom of spirit are in the great tradition of Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac, wandering from shore to shore, mountain top to ocean, filling notebooks with his own unique sensibility and crafting enduring verse from his questing soul and perspective eye, radiating out from the molten core of his imagination and sensibility.

Zegans’ love for the Berkshires can also be found in this collection. Poems like, Inversion, Notch Road and Bascom, radiate with energy found in these foothills, and it is hardly surprising my favorite poem, Seeing, is set at Bear Rock Falls overlooking Sheffield.

For more information about “The Underwater Typewriter,” please contact www.pelekinesis.com.