Poetry Review
The Human Cannonball
by Halli Villegas
At its best the despair of others reminds us of the persistence of happiness. When we watch or hear of suffering we may be lucky enough to recognize that for most of us life isn’t so bad. If it’s successful, the sadness artists express soothes our nerves by reminding us that pain is universal. As Elton John put it so succinctly: “Sad songs say so much.” Halli Villegas, in her latest book (believe your own press, 2005) The Human Cannonball, uses this phenomenon to build a short but affecting collection told in the voice of some of our greatest sufferers—circus performers.
Villegas’ collection recalls the once great but now mostly forgotten poetic masterpiece, Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology. Like that work Villegas’ book creates a microcosmic society (for Masters’ the imaginary Spoon River, Illinois) and through the interplay of poetic voices shows the foibles and falsities we all participate in. The power of such writing, whether by Masters or Villegas, is that it doesn’t take long for us to recognize in these poetic voices some aspect of ourselves. When Villegas writes: “I saw the hesitation./He held the pose for a heartbeat longer than usual/his arm went a little higher/his hand trembled a bit,” in the poem “The Knife Thrower’s Wife,” she subtly evokes the double-edge of true passion, the terrible proximity of love and hate.
Villegas calls these “narrative poems,” and she is right to do so; they tell intimate and affecting stories. However, while Villegas gains from her narratives much of the power of fiction to make complete worlds for us, her poems correspondingly suffer from the curse of prosodists—indifference to the poetic line. Since the disappearance of rhyme and/or meter as essential structures of verse, the question of what constitutes a vital poetic line has been thrown wide open. Being a prescriptivist about this is consequently a good way of displeasing all the people all of the time. Still, in several places: “with misdirection while passing a juicy bit,” from “The Shell Game” or “uncontrollable” and “The trick is,” from “The Lion Tamer,” one wishes Villegas had wrestled a little more with that unruly beast of poetry—the line.
C. Durning Carroll
Charles Durning Carroll 
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