Walking is Believing in Charles Butler’s Powerful Collection 39 Poems

New York is a challenge on the best of days.  Summers are blisteringly hot. Winters numb the nose, freeze all digits. Every walk on a city street is an opportunity to engage with the world or let it stream by unnoticed.  Homeless folk sleeping on rat dung, playgrounds dotted with dog poop, crowded sidewalks teeming with angry people struggling to get where they need to be, pushing impediments both human and non aside with equal disregard.  And if you are paying attention, if you look life in the eye, you see what Charles Butler sees at every turn, the observations he makes in his very accessible collection of poems called simply 30 Poems.  Butler sees and describes the dark side as it blends with the light, he feels the life that refuses to be extinguished even as it fades.

“you almost miss it

almost

someone’s life bled out

at your feet

think on it

times you bled”

                                                                                                            ii legal pad poetry

Butler’s Brooklyn-twanged voice gives each poem its own resonance, singular presence. Each one is a story and a journey, part of the next story that is a journey that leads to the next all the way to the final stop.  All the poems lean on one another, leading us into hearts, minds, souls, beings that celebrate and suffer through to the end, where we see that the sum total is a stories lead to the same journey’s end.

Butler doesn’t pretend to offer answers.  His collection is a compendium of observations.  Deep as the message is, he’s not trying to be profound. 

“I leave

the big poems

t’the

assholes

y’know ‘em

ones who figure

they can change

the world

with a stanza

or a verb”

just poetry. . . man

Hey scatters the collection with human encounters, human experiences, human emotions, none of which will surprise the reader but will evoke a visceral response.  The joy and heartbreak of holding a newborn baby, black and female; the gratitude for friendship and the mourning of its loss; the taste of coffee and it likeness to young love; the shudder of knowledge as old age creeps in.  And so many more acknowledgements of the joys and sorrows, discoveries and disappointents that are the human condition. All observed in Butler”s “walkabouts at night” when he “was lucky and went this way instead of that way” (“Normal”).

At the end of the 39 Poems, his 39 Steps, walks through and around Brooklyn and America, Butler sums up in CODB:

“only. . .

joy, pain, hope, sadness

just the

cost of doin’ business

‘n livin’

Is bizness”

A powerful commitment to the vagaries that define the fragile confusion that is life.  A stimulating read.