Michael Salcman, Crossing the Tape, Spuyten Duyvil, 2024, ISBN: 978-1-959556-99-2, pp. 124, $18.00
Michael Salcman’s sixth book of poetry is cosmopolitan and intimate, a collection of autobiographical and social vignettes written in succinct and sculptural free verse. One comes away with a portrait of a life, an overheard conversation from a go
od long marriage, plus ruminations of someone looking back over their life during the last century of Western art and history. For instance, these poems reflect on having childhood polio, the Holocaust that impacted Salcman’s Jewish family, his experiences as a neurosurgeon, and further, on painters Hopper, de Kooning, Raoul Middleman of Baltimore, the architect Gaudi, and others through ekphrastic poetry. Salcman is conversant with the world, sleeves rolled up, with weary eyes at times plus a wry smile.
Crossing the Tape breaks his typical concerns into five sections. Two personal lyric sections bookend three middle sections on “War & Violence,” “Body & Brain,” and “Ekphrasis” (poetry based on the visual arts). On the one hand, these poems convey a personal voice, as expected in autobiographical poetry. On the other, Salcman’s poetry offers the wisdom of experience “recollected in tranquility,” to quote Wordsworth. While par for the course two centuries ago, Salcman’s poise and thoughtfulness feel like an anomaly today among social media outbursts, bullhorn trends, and art of wild expression over calmer insight.
Maybe Salcman’s poetry has never been entirely swept away by lyric emotion because—I hazard—having been born Jewish in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, and having escaped the Holocaust before immigrating to America—his view is sober. The powerful poem, “Books on the Firing Range” (p. 35), supports this conclusion as Salcman links the trench warfare slaughter of World War I to “a bloody reminder of the streets outside our windows.” Unlike Wordsworth, Salcman does not retreat to the natural world. Unlike the more contemporary Mary Oliver, he’s not watching a passing hawk outside the window to soar through a merged imagination, to shed muddy factoid for the fleet sublime.
Salcman is an urban, thinking, factual, and cosmopolitan poet. In “Searching” (p. 36), he notes, “We are still young and crawling,” a statement of social morality. Doubtful of progress, the metaphor also implies the hope of progress via its Darwinist evolutionary analogy of “young and crawling.” In a few poems about his own surgical days, he writes, “I guess it’s the challenge of death I miss.” (p. 47). Salcman is a poet who looks into the mirror and returns with a sober view plus the sanctity of good intent.
Salcman wrote an entire complex book about his relationship to his European and Jewish past, Prague Spring: Before & After, a prize-winning third collection out with Evening Street Press of California. That was a heavy book, maybe repetitive in the end, maybe also ornate with descriptions of adored Prague. Some aspects of Jewish flight from persecution appear in this latest too, but more as haunting background and context to Salcman’s freedom to be an individual, such as in the lyrical lament of “After Some Sayings By Rabbi Earl Grollman.” It appears sometimes as satire, as in the playful, yet moving, “The Last Jew In Kabul” (pp. 37-38).
In the first section of Crossing the Tape, there are several poems from a writer’s perspective, late in life, during our Internet era, including an ode to the paper book (“The Paper,” p. 20), and about the fond stack of works to be read to feed a writer’s inchoate creativity (“The Stack,” p. 21). A mysterious rejection letter likely issued out of an estate sale, decades delayed, arrives in the delightful poem called “The Envelope” (p. 19). Though Salcman is successful compared to that anonymous writer in Robert Frost’s poem, “The Black Cottage,” Salcman still implies the question: So what, this writer’s life? The poem answers: I breathe, I live, I write.
Salcman’s sixth collection has many gems, more than I can tackle. Salcman also tries his hand at the prose poem (pp. 24-27), repetitive chant (p. 52), satire (on contemporary literary trends) (p. 87), 15-line sonnet (a literary trend) (p. 71), a loose-rhymed 14-line chant of a sonnet (“Reflective Sonnet”) (p. 89), and light verse (doubling as elegy) (p. 104). It offers mixed results; it’s a good dare.
One of my favorite ten poems in the book was “Reflective Sonnet,” which is less personal than most of Salcman’s poetry. Here it goes in full:
The space that opens is the space that closes.
Looking East I can no longer see the West.
My arms feel light when I’m done lifting heavy.
In the midst of sadness the soul takes flight.
Who are you to tell me how I must live.
When filled with love I am done with envy.
In the fullness of age I get steadily younger.
In the midst of weakness I get much stronger.
In the onrushing crowd is the onset of lonely.
In thrall to splendor I’m struck with sadness.
Giving in to knowledge I’m filled with humility.
Knowing more and more I am learning less.
In every ending there’s a new beginning.
In the center of certainty there’s only a guess.
To examine this “Reflective Sonnet,” it’s free verse. For instance, the opening line is iambic pentameter with a feminine ending, but the seventh and eighth lines are tetrameter with anapests, so not intentionally controlled meter. Each line of course proceeds with a reversal of subject matter and word play combined, where a medial caesura is created more by phrase than comma. The first four lines are unrhymed, but lines 6-9 are ABBA, and lines 10-14, ABACA. This said, I love the reversals as well as the end of this poem.
Salcman also shares some touching poems on aging within a lasting marriage in the book’s final fifth section. He’s always interesting in his insights into contemporary art in the fourth section, and deft at times when he handles history or medicine. Because poetry is not primarily a narrative art, this 115-page book likely grows stronger at 85 pages even at the expense of many good poems, to permit more resonance.
While comparisons may be odious, it is worth comparing Crossing the Tape to some contemporary offerings as a tool of review. Compared to the selected poems of another worldly, intelligent poet, David Rigsbee’s Watchman in The Knife Factory (2024), Salcman’s poetry is more focused on core topics that matter to him. As a result, methinks, Salcman’s poems are stronger. There are no incidental longish yarns here.
Salcman’s touching poems on the delicate dances within a good marriage offer an emotional depth that also can be found within Dorianne Laux’s Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected (2019). Unlike Laux’s 2024 book with its lyric poems of constant poignancy, like too many pastel flowers, Salcman’s poetry is finely tuned but offers a range of felt experiences and insights.
I just finished re-reading the first two books of the Chasidic Jewish poet Yehoshua November. November is a wonderful spiritual poet rooted in the crowded everyday of New Jersey, devoted to his family and Jewish heritage, while living a spiritual life within the sharp elbows of a lower middle class, East Coast hubbub. In comparison, Salcman has more of a surgeon’s factual reverence for life. Salcman’s outlook strikes me as humanist. His optimism peeks through, tempered by twentieth century reckonings of war and strife.
In rereading Crossing the Tape for this review, I found myself most drawn to the personal first section of poems from a writer’s life and full of reflective hindsight, and especially the elegiac fifth section. The fifth section is the most revealing, unique, and poignant of this book. Titled “In the Twilight,” Salcman here tackles love within a long marriage in “Quarrelling, for Us, Was a Kind of Intimacy” (p. 93), the occasional daydream world of being in one’s seventies in “In the House” and “Travesties of Aging” (pp. 95 & 98), and recounts a beautiful elegy for friends in “New Yorkers” (p. 108). He offers a meditation on family in the wake of The Holocaust as emotional memory in “Dust in the Street” (p. 111). The final three poems say something summative about Salcman’s worldview. What is it? Read the book to find out. The final poem, maybe a fist raised against futility, offers a title leaning toward its own better angel: “For I Have Neglected to Praise.”
In sum, Salcman’s craft and depth make this a rewarding collection for fellow writers. His poetry rooted in descriptions of everyday life, yet stunning range, should draw recruits to contemporary poetry.
© Michael Salcman and G.H. Mosson
G.H. Mosson is the author of six poetry collections, including Family Snapshot as a Poem in Time (Finishing Line Press 2019), Questions of Fire (Plain View Press 2009), and Singing the Forge forthcoming from David Robert Books in May 2025. His poetry has appeared in The Tampa Review, The Potomac Review, California Quarterly, and Loch Raven Review. He has MA from The Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and MFA from New England College. For more, seek www.ghmosson.com.
Michael Salcman is a retired physician and teacher of art history in his late seventies. He was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. He is a child of the Holocaust and a survivor of polio. His poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, The Café Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, Raritan, and Smartish Pace. His books include The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises), nominated for The Poets Prize; The Enemy of Good Is Better; Poetry in Medicine, a widely used anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness and healing (Persea Books, 2015); A Prague Spring, Before & After (winner 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize); and Shades & Graces, the inaugural winner of the Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020). His fifth collection, Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022) recently appeared. Crossing the Tape is his sixth collection (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024).
The Loch Raven Review 