The micro genre of crime poetry can be a mixed bag with a lot of it falling into the prose poem category. Which is fine, if you look at some of the Crime Song Wednesday selections that we highlighted last year many of them read as well as they were preformed. So, I wasn’t too sure what to expect from Verse Noir by David Rachels. According to his bio Rachels is Professor of English and Fine Arts at Virginia Military Institute. He also runs the blog Noirboiled Notes.
For years Ken Bruen has used epigraphs taken from classic crime books and formatted the quotes with line breaks that resemble poetry. The line breaks put a different emphasis on the words and in some cases really highlight the message and the imagery. Rachels does something similar at his blog where he takes lines from hardboiled pulp classics and reformats them as poems. At its best it is like a cover song that outshines the original by virtue of emphasizing different parts or stressing different emotions. Think Johnny Cash’s version of “Hurt”.
Ok, let’s get to the collection proper. Verse Noir is a collection of 77 poems that cuts a wide stylistic swath while offering a variety of pleasures.
As I said earlier the prose poem is the most common type of crime poem and we get those here too. Like this poem “Smarts”
I had no idea
How much brains
He had
Until
I saw them.
We also get character studies in miniature written in a concentrated style that tells everything about the person with an economy of words. Here is “Numbers II”
He had tally marks tattoed
On both of his arms
One arm with marks for
Each man killed
The other with marks for
Each woman conqured
But he could never keep track of
Which arm was which.
We also find good use of metaphor, particularly in a way that we don’t often see in crime fiction. Here is “Soul III”
His life was one long
Fire sale of the soulEvery smoke-damaged moral
Every water-logged scruple
Was priced to sell.
While some of the poems are relatively straight forward there are others that hinge on other meanings that show great care for word choice. For example in “Union” look at the variations of meaning in only twelve words. The imagery on first pass suggests a sexual liaison that wasn’t to be and then loops back around to suggest what happened as a result of it not happening.
He was left
High and dry.She was found
Low and wet.
Or the implication that lies at the heart of “Marriage II”.
He would have
Married a gun
But he could
Never find one
With a big
Enough barrel.
Peppered throughout the book are distilled philosophical nuggets of hardboiled wisdom (“Bullets never/Negotiate.”) and the book even ends with a lengthy section called “Rules” which I’m sure any reader of hardboiled fiction and any hardboiled character would recognize.
So how well does the poetry form lend itself to crime? At its best it’s a great marriage and the temptation to try that union is a great one for writers. Even I tried my hand at a crime poem once.
Verse Noir by David Rachels is largely a success.
Recommended.
