Newer Lies.

Kim Fahner is a poet and the author of You Must Imagine the Cold Here.

To read Jalowica’s Newer Lies is to enter into another dimension, in a manner of speaking. Here, poems are clever turns of phrase, imagery that seems to cut deeper than the phrasings, something which may or may not be seen as a positive aspect of Jalowica’s style. You end up reading images over and over again, but sometimes they just don’t seem to link up or connect. This may not be the most accessible book of poems, for those beyond the poets, university professors, and poet-critics, but it does have at its core a strong sense of imagery. Underlying all poems there are repetitive motifs of layers (of meaning), masks (of being and of perception), and lies (from the past, the present, and newer ones that may reinvent themselves from those borne in the past).

In “What I Need for You,” the reader gets a sense of Jalowica’s talents, of his intensity, as he writes, “I need your love. I need / to throw down roads / across these painkilling continents / with their soft illogical music, / their frightened animals, / their moody heartbeat not yet / my own, not yet possessed.” Images of ghosts, as well as a sense of loss and regret, are embodied in “China Hunger” when Jalowica writes: “I’m out here among the ghosts now. They touch / down one by one in morose rhythms. Alight / in a blind white ruthless storm of regret.” In “Hunter,” Jalowica writes again about loss and nostalgia: “All I have left: memory / and its deliberate burials / —ruined by duration, / torn in the glare of love / and faded devotion.”

Perhaps this particular reader’s problem with Jalowica’s collection is that it is darker than most, that it tends to dwell in past recesses of memory and life’s loves. At points, one wishes that the rainbow in his poem “Protective Colours” would appear a bit more regularly in these pieces. Not that you would want excessive hope and happiness in all poems, but perhaps a sense of being in the present, of being vibrant in the present, with hope for the future, would lighten the tone of this book.