Lotus Buffet

Like Jack Kerouac, Rupert Fike is mad to talk. A Rupert Fike poem isn't small talk though. Fike wants to be saved, wants to live. One of my favorites in this volume is “Toast.” “In the name of all that’s toast it must go,” he writes, as he struggles to put the diode-eye out of a machine that, Cyclops-like, watches over our lives. Armed with hammer and nail, Fike is Everyman-Ulysses out for justice. But Fike also knows his limits. In the lovely last poem of this volume, the poet accepts a bittersweet truth he cannot change. The soul must seek another outlet as children outgrow the past. Like Fike–and Kerouac, too–we may love the beauty of “words, words, words stretched out, limitless,” though, in the end, poetry of this caliber leads us to understand when and why they must leave off, as well. —Stephen Bluestone