Description

Mr. Ubiquity captures the whimsy and terror, the absurdity and profundity of dreams. It is a world where Santa Claus shows up to shoot fireworks in July and Vladimir Lenin is a sinister downstairs lodger and Lyndon Johnson and Golda Meir convert the calendar to yo-yo time. Identity is a key theme, from the title poem where a man gets confused with his twenty doppelgängers playing violin in the mirror and “can’t tell the helping hand from the phony gesture,” to a son “puzzling his father back together” after the father has jumped from a moving train, to a dreamer at a rock concert/mass demonstration who “becomes the crowd consciousness” and later feels what the woman beside him feels at the onset of her period. Replete with musical references, the book prefigures Levering’s later book, Coltrane’s God, as John Lennon, Bessie Smith, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Latin canticles, bluegrass fiddle music, Credence Clearwater are all heard. Despite the rapid metamorphoses and strange dream logic, these poems connect with deep emotions, such as “Kite,” where the speaker flies a kite with his Parkinsons’ stricken father, and “Vietnam,” where a veteran struggles to come to terms with his gory war experience.