Jim Krull reviews The Islands for SPD Staff Picks

 (john.sakkis@gmail.com for review copies)


"John Sakkis "The Islands" Nightboat Books

2015

there is still a prejudice when

the trend-following flying fish of Phylakopi

hide behind ancient stone fortifications

begging to become blue ankle tattoos

    (p. 19)

A set of islands implies saturated areas, and a sea of difference to go

around that surface.

As a symbol an island could be a person, or thoughts, or memory, or

observations: a collection of them where a THIS is found; and

this THIS is surrounded by mysterious contents (the sea), part

floating on top, and whatever vast underneath. Or it could be one

of the bodies of land in the Aegean.

*

(Going from the book's first section through to the third.) I found both

an inability to successfully grasp and accept the flow of the

rhythms, and a quite deep and nearly sentimental attachment to his

images. I am drawn to a table on which young family members,

cousins, are half forced from play; the play that was equally

engrossing to me then as the memory of the meal is to me now.

I merely highlight one aspect in the variety of images and emotions

we are brought to bear into by the Author's presentation; the

quote picked above comes from some other aspect of youth,

different, but older, still transformed from the table experience.

These examples of the sensations created in reading are not to imply

that the book is one-way exploration of some special sense of

growing up. But the area is set as for what may happen, the ear

arranged for the later sections; there is a vast array that settles on

everything.

*

Only during the second section (or so I thought) did I have some

sense of how to read the rhythms. They become insistent; they

were insistent before, but I did not feel the beat in them, sense the

lines and phrases; they coalesce further than the first section let

allow, in its almost tranquil pace, so that more and more often

that pound and release is heard.

eight years

before the coin-baller

comes and returns

those fixins

that uncrowned

gold coin/ bothersome bluebird

because of you

I'm full of care

and wanting to

smith the stake

while downplaying

"the great indignity

of being kept

in the hospital for

an ingrown toenail"

(p. 89)

Layered on top of these changes in musical structure are other

senses of memory, of ancestors personal and cultural, immediate to

life experience and the experience of life in books of history, all

mixed, with a surveying exactness. But difference and variation

come through again, what is memorial or elegiac becomes

aggressive or abstract.

I do not mean to say that there is any one way to read through this

diverse book. Each section contains a different part of the total

variety of music, sometimes units thrown together in an unmarked

paragraph, sometimes laid out in a line down the page. Mazes of

references are deep-set and piled high, but are ordered as a half-

secret catalogue that gives a capability to the interested to search."