RE Sun Poking copyright MICHAEL PAUL LADANYI
RE Bird Feather Voodoo copyright MICHAEL PAUL LADANYI

A Review of the chapbook All Your Picasso Trees, authored by: Michael Paul Ladanyi

Review by Donald Levin, poet, novelist, editor, professor
 
It is impossible to read Michael Paul Ladanyi's poetry quickly. Like the best 
of his work, All Your Picasso Trees, a fourteen-poem chapbook due 
to be published by the Sun Rising Poetry Press, June 2004, is remarkable
for both the luxury of the language and the densely-layered imagery of each 
line of every poem, and it is a tribute to his craft that these take time to 
appreciate. Ladanyi's work continually yokes multiple, often seemingly 
contradictory images, and challenges us to find the connections (often 
repaying our efforts with the kind of "Aha!" that attends the solution of Zen
koans). This book requires us to linger awhile to enjoy its riches as fully 
as possible, as we must do with a fine piece of music. The journey is 
always worthwhile. 
 
I use the word "enjoy" here in complete awareness of its implications,
especially because it is a risky word to use with these poems. For these
are not easy pieces, and while the words of this collection's poetry satisfy
the mouth like a cold sweet plum, their wisdom is not the easy, soul's-ease
message of so much of contemporary poetry. Rather, Ladanyi's work here
is hard-edged, the tone hard as the bones that are a constant motif in the 
poetry, the poet's empathy for the world he describes so well hard as the
"wet violin pain" that shrieks through the collection's title piece, as through
all of these works.
 
Reading carefully through these pieces, one realizes that the poems in 
All Your Picasso Trees are almost unbearably alive to the sensual world. 
Indeed, in my own experience with the poems I felt as if I were moving 
through their actual landscapes. For example, in "Every Peacock Garden," 
the poet made me alert to the sound of the sky cracking, the sight of the 
world shimmering as through a "water-film over your eyes," and the feel 
of "snow bone corpses" in the clammy cold of a "cyclops fog." The same 
kinds of sensations permeate each of the other poems. Ladanyi is 
particularly adept at the synesthetic image, in which one sense impression
 evokes another, as in the following lines, from "Piano Glass Dancing":
 
Stone a pillow on blade and grass,
Hands a scream, our apple trees
On fire, their smell a safe voice honesty.
 
Throughout this collection, the thematic thrust is announced in a question
 that recurs three times in two separate pieces. "Where do you sleep," "Saint 
Water" asks twice, in its opening and closing lines. And the collection's title
poem asks, "where would you sleep if all your Picasso trees / were aluminum
stolen from termite-bell cribs?" Though the question itself is not posed else-
where, slumber is explicitly mentioned in "Apple Welting," "Every Peacock 
Garden," "Snake and Belly," and "So Loud and Red," and is alluded to in the 
pillow in the quotation cited above from "Piano Glass Dancing." Considering 
the importance these many references give to sleep in this collection, I 
suggest we might rephrase the question from the first two poems in this way: 
Amid the real havoc of the world of the senses as represented by these poems, 
amid the pain and loss that are the dominant characteristics of their world (as 
it is of our "real" world), amid the constant moving down to death that is the 
only truly inescapable journey of our lives, where might one find refuge? 

This is, of course, an enormously important question, and Ladanyi would 
have done well by his readers just by asking it.
 
But he also suggests where we can find an answer. The answer to this 
question in All Your Picasso Trees, like the answer Ladanyi gives else-
where in his work, is to be found in art, that is, in our human efforts to 
order the world around us. Throughout these poems Ladanyi gives us 
not only images of art (to note just two, the painted shoulder in "Apple 
Welting" and the glass birds in the poem of that name), but several 
allusions to artists (in the title poem, of course) and other writers 
(Suarez in "Chimes and Cities," Yeats' "Leda and the Swan" in 
"Apple Welting," and mentions of both Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas,
 particularly allusions to the wonderful "In my Craft or Sullen Art" of 
the collection's final poem). While, as he says in "Sun Poking," 
"Fern and sea care nothing / for craft and word," Ladanyi knows well 
that we ourselves care deeply, desperately, for words: "i thank you, 
crow voice and oaken / tongue slapping this raining," he says in 
"Hazel Burning," celebrating the power of language. Art, specifically
the craft of poetry, is our stay against the ruin and welter of life, the 
pieces in this collection remind us over and over again.
 
Earlier in this review I compared these poems to a fine piece of 
music, and noted how we must take our time with them. In closing 
I will note that, again like the finest musical works, when we return 
to fully savor them, the poems in Michael Paul Ladanyi's moving 
All Your Picasso Trees, repeatedly reward us with new insights, 
as well as renewed appreciation for the clarity, wisdom, and 
empathy of this poet's vision.
 






(REPRINTED HERE COURTESY OF THE POET)
 

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