A Territory of Welcome:
Like a once-obscure indie band blowing up the blogosphere, much of the talk behind Your Father on the Train of Ghosts has been on the back story, how two All-Star poets who have yet to nail down Hall of Fame credentials got together to write a book. And how they used email to do it, trading poem for poem in a kind of lineated penpalship of collaborated prolificacy. Rumor has it they wrote 500 poems, those ambitious and/or compulsive maniacs. But the backstory is just that: backstory. And what we’ve got when the intrigue of process has worn off is one big-ass book, and a wholesale victory for conspiratorial inspiration. No doubt you could go crazy trying to figure out who wrote what, but at some point, you stop trying—based on their past work, you can seek in the poems evidence of Gallaher’s talky, effusive, delightfully random tendencies, or Waldrep’s calculated, restrained, effortless execution, but really, there’s little point in attaching one name to any given poem, even if much of the roster of 124 poems here was published piecemeal and each under one name alone. Fact is, these writers seem a perfect match for each other, and both of them, page after page, surprise, like in “You Need Not Be Present to Win”:
And then comes that moment in the process when we all have to transplant live organs from dogs into cats. There will be an exam. Or maybe this is the exam.
Much has been made of the themes found in the book, and how the title itself is a patchwork of three prominent nouns that feature heavily in the work. And though there are signals of unity and direct conversation in the book (see instances of “chrome” on pages 139, 140, 161, and 174, for example), this bounte
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ous package is notable for how the ghosts are the poems themselves: most of them seem fragile narratives just barely hanging on—stories are there, they are almost always there, but these don’t feel like, you know, “narrative poems,” because there’s just something too loose for them to feel that tug of prosaic tale-telling, something too dodgy and evasive, such as this bit from “As Mastery Declines into Altitude and Forgiveness”:
BOA Editions, 2011
Nick Courtright on Your Father on the Train of Ghosts by G. C. Waldrep and John Gallaher