Review #3: “Gretel’s Biscuits” by Spack

Pointless tone-setting asides,
like so,
mark Spack out as a writer convinced
of his own charisma.
The result is like a comedian stopping mid-joke
to nod toward the punch line.
The thought of Spack, as he tells us,
at a mid-Seventies typewriter, using
just his index fingers, is the sort
of infinitely calculating
image that makes this collection both patronising
and careerist. Every line breaks to make us believe
he is just going for it, he’s alive
and human and today
he will just split the stanzas at a weak
word and, by God, if he can do this with

some wistful turn of phrase
then we’d best believe the whole book
to be a badge of pure sunlight
or maybe it’s us who are heartless
and calculating. I am sad to find myself
addressing the author, not the poems,
but Spack leaves me little choice:

You are not as naïve as you’d have us believe
and you are not nearly as clever as you pretend
that you’re not. I will watch your career
for the poems where you start to write imaginary
reviews of books you have not yet written.
And on that day, for the first time,
we will hear the truth.