Chaudiere Books, 2007
Read by Jesse Ferguson
Everything is Movies is a rollicking and elastic first collection, and it announces Lea as a voice to listen for. These poems evince a magpie curiosity, building linguistic nests from all things shiny, be they junk in the gutter or the jewels of literature and philosophy. Lea gathers and loves these fragments of nature, thought and emotion because, as A.M. Klein wrote, “until it has been praised, that part / has not been.” Implicit in many of Lea’s poems is that all things are connected, though not in the sense that they are the same and equivalent (which would render cataloguing needless), and not in the sense of any specific religious view, though Lea borrows at will from various mythologies. He, like Whitman, seeks to tease out the connections between things, to celebrate synchronicity and the unexpected harmony that arises if we will only listen “when the car alarm medley’d” (in the poem “Song Writhing”).
These poems are by turns reverent and irreverent; they delve into the arcana of metaphysics, and then they disarm with confessional passages, self-deprecation and hammy comedy. In “Unnatural Speeds,” for instance, the speaker speculates:
during all this the ice is melting.
A gradual melting that must relate
to time — so — time is melting, or,
melting is time. The inflection is
unclear. Hoped you could clarify, get back
to me. First, there’s no brainy sobriquet for it.
Nothing so cute.
There is a double-gesture in many of the most memorable of Lea’s poems both toward and away from any totalizing philosophy. We must ask with the speaker of “Crowded Out” whether “the world is more than dishes and / miscarriages, you know . . . don’t // believe Nietzsche. What’s he ever / done for the garden?”
Lea achieves most when he develops fewer images with greater detail, taking the time to connect each to the next by means of a rough sense of setting, or adherence to theme. Through greater coherence, poems such as “Aquifer” and “Unnatural Speeds” become more memorable. His poems ramble incorrigibly; they ask you if you want a beer; they ask you if you want a pillow fight; they ask you your thoughts on the ontological significance of couch springs. Above all, they are funny and smart, yet they let you in on all the in-jokes.
