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Passing for Blue
by DB Cox.
32 pages $6
Rank Stranger Press, Mt. Olive, NC.
The latest chapbook from Rank Stranger Press is Passing for Blue by the musician/poet DB Cox. Blue is a beautiful thirty-two page, perfect bound production that showcases the poet's knowledge of music, of sound in general, and his ability to create the image-driven narrative.
These are dark poems. For good or bad, the night is what any active musician knows. Playing professionally is not a first shift gig. In Passing for Blue, Cox guides the reader on a ride through the rough groove of neon nights down "whore-haunted streets," in and out of clubs and alleyways, out past trains and into the deepest part of darkness. His understanding of rhythm, his consistency of line, his ability to combine the alliterative with the visual would seem to align him with the beats. But there lies beneath these poems a harder knowledge of life, the voice of a man who has been to war, a survivor of far worse than these musical tales.
"Beat"
it's cold.
bleak.
no freedom
in the frozen streets. . .
blue eyes
cracking like ice
no dreaming
on the sidewalks tonight.
In this version of the beat story, a homeless man drags "history/around town/in a brown paper bag." There is no romance in this imagery. The days of mad youth out searching for thrills and fighting conventional expectations are no more. Here, beat simply means defeated.
The city is truly an unforgiving, violent place in this volume: from "passing for blue"
My best friend
died last year,
in a 24-hoiur store-
shot by some shaky kid.
Even beautiful, haunted music becomes a fierce act of nature in "the sky is crying:"
jagged,
blue notes
razor marks
against the sky-
deep, deadly cuts
that pour enough
bloody tears
to bring on thunder.
"where do they all come from" is an incisive, imaginative look at Mark David Chapman, as he prepares to go make his mark in musical history:
He opens his eyes & checks his watch.
Almost time to rock n roll,
lock & load,
cross the street, & disappear
into the faceless
New York hum…
In "shades of ray," an elegy and lament for the loss of Ray Charles, we see the playful, unexpected rhymes and the sense of rhythm that sets Cox's work apart from many of the poets who toil over today's street poetry:
dark shades of ray
swaying to
fatback funk
& blue indigo
incognito,
comping dirges so slow,
the drummer's lost
& looking for a tempo.
I am usually horrified by the ineptness of new poetry that often gets sent my way. I'm sure other folks feel the same way about my work. In recent months I have been lucky enough to receive excellent volumes by poets like John Unland and Mark Hartenbach, works which show great attention to the actual craft of poetry. I would place DB Cox's work alongside these other excellent small press projects. And certainly, Rank Stranger Press must be applauded for such a quality production.
Finally, it's not easy for a musician to step into the literary world. Cox has done a fine job of condensing his twenty-seven years of experience on the blues circuit into poems that are hard-edged and at once engaging.
--Tim Peeler
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