Kevin KILLIAN reviews Rude Girl...

Lately I've been noticing a lot of new poetry being written here in the Bay Area that seems like Gary Snyder or Kenneth Rexroth could have written it fifty years ago. Actually I like some of this retro-eco-writing, but when it comes to a new twist, John Sakkis is my go to guy. The tidal basin of the Bay Area has left its mark on every aspect of the region, and everywhere you look you see some lovely vestige of nature, and Rude Girl is filled with the names of landmarks, towns, neighborhoods (Fulton Street, Oakland, the "Panhandle standing on one leg"): I imagine a computer might graph out the spots named in the book and produced a complicated cats cradle of string on pins that would show you Sakkis' trajectory with more accuracy than I can. If you have been waiting to see if Rude Girl is worth buying, I'm here to tell you to lift your finger, press the button and order now. It is a beautiful book full of hope and promise.

Though I will say that Sakkis neglects not the dark side of life either. (You can imagine, since his last book was called Gary Gygax!) I don't go much by blurbs but I do like Brandon Brown's suggestion that Rude Girl reflects today's financial crisis with its evocation of "broken economies." One could write a paper on the way Sakkis' verse slips and slides across pages nimbly avoiding ruin, like the protagonist of a disaster film: "the East Bay/ is running out as we climb in/ I jump up to the floor," etc. First book of poetry composed in Parkour?

It's divided into three sections, but they are fairly fluid and elements of each appears in the others. In the beginning piece, Sakkis gives us the "two kinds of hills: the first slow and/ shuffling, the second fast and frenetic." In part two, "Rude Girl" itself, the two kinds of hills are seen again, as if by another viewer--maybe the child grown older? Or the adult recalling the visions of childhood?---the hills, now "baited with maggots," are "red or yellow fish/ out of the green ground." You can see that Sakkis's syntax is slithery, far from straightforward, and there may be some extra difficulty because of this factor, but the book as a whole hangs together better than most such project. "These operations," he decides, "belong together." A play runs through Rude Girl like a river, a cantata of voices from real life and its outer rings. The final section is "The Breakable Ones," when it was published originally I thought of it as a track by Prince (like "The Beautiful Ones (They'll Hurt You Every Time") but now I think in terms of advice I got when I was a teenage wanna-be poet, from the august Paul Blackburn, on the subject of metric in poetry. "There are only two sorts of rules about prosody, and some are set in stone, but the fun ones are the breakable ones."