Review of Living at the Movies by Michael Stephens – Jim Carroll Book Reviews – CatholicBoy.com

Living at the Movies

Review by Michael Stephens
Guardian , circa 1973

[Contributed by Jim Carroll]

Living at the Movies
By Jim Carroll
Grossman / $4.50 paper

Living at the Movies is a strong mysterious potion of refracted lyrical language
shattered into elaborate patterns of truth and beauty. You cannot believe the beautiful
textures herein — you can believe this upon reading, for instance:

the fancied tilt of stars, sordid doves
burning in the hollow brick oven,
oceans which generalize tears. it is
known to us

The truth is the consistency of the language, and its unnameable ability to create
experience, not through language. but language as the experience itself. There are poems
in this book — like “The Distances” — that come down to us from a timeless
place.

Jim Carroll knows counterpoint, and his poems, back to back, and even within each
other, line by line, are pushing and pulling, making for dramatic tensions. He mixes the
serious with the frivolous, the mysterious with the known, making the high and lofty work
on levels with Joey Heatherton and Orange Julius — read “Love Rockets” which is
pure pop presody. And then earlier, he’ll cast a line straight from a French classical era
of high dope and despair, a Baudelaire or Mallarme-like line: “The shower of black
infants across the infected landscape..,” (“August”) Then too he likes to
use the pastoral with the urban, and he is forever watching, watching, “like watching
wind push Seaflowers”; “we are here on 53rd and 6th watching steel/turn to
ivy”. Yeats on Saint Mark’s Place? Of course, even that; any damn source that fits —
birds and wild flowers and concrete!

and the wind is pushing like pine
cones against the angel’s dying
sperm.

I like to think that is how John Donne might say it, if he were around today. Jim
Carroll may be our first genuine 20th Century metaphysical poet.