Becoming: The Underground Journal New Releases Reviewed 2004

The Singing of the Wheels Poems from Somewhere Not Far J. Brian Long Wind Publications $10.00

Perhaps the modern reader has learned that poetry is something that is felt beneath the cover of ones skin rather than in the structured rhyme and diction of its more classic forms.  Perhaps the contemporary poet knows that meter and rhythm are found in the mirror of our own, sometimes ragged, breaths as we each progress through our own obstacles and evolve changed, new and somehow whole.  Upon reading J. Brian Long’s newest collection The Singing of the Wheels: Poems from Somewhere Not Far, it is apparent that Long is a poet who marks this evolution with exquisite integrity.  Throughout Long’s collection the reader is a lucky witness to his ever-increasing command of language and imagery as he himself evolves into a prevailing individual who finds sanctity in his own experience and the incidents of his life with others.  From the opening of Long’s collection, he assures both himself and the reader that if his journey offers nothing more, there will be the painstaking sincerity of one who tries to learn from his own mistakes.  In Enough he states It was that my eyes were cinder and grey as doubts of God. It was that you feared me… a strange and ominous preface to an honest thoroughfare that leads the poet around the circumference of his own soul, into the more gritty and painful details of his decent.  Details found in poems such as User – Watch how she places my fingers onto the warm/of her tongue, how she draws them/into the slow moan of her./I know. I do. I should go back to the rain again, take/the fast road away from this/craving, this marrow-need,/of all I once used to be. And what used to be maybe nothing more than the path that finally escorts him to a freedom that allows, if nothing more, growth despite the ever increasing and open need for change and reconciliation.   In reading The Singing of the Wheels, one discovers that the highway Long so dutifully describes in his poems is in fact a larger literal metaphor for his own life.  One that is worth the task of embarking onto the journey of self, even if only to emerge more aware of the road that lies ahead.  This collection deserves the highest recommendation, as it is perhaps the most honest, blatant, and sincere produced this year.

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