Rumors of Electricity by Richard Krech

Reviewed by Erin McKnight

ISBN-10: 0976985756; ISBN-13: 978-0976985754
Sunnyoutside Press, 2008

What is most evident in Richard Krech’s first, and title, poem, “Rumors of Electricity,” is the indication that any convergence of time and place in the sixteen poems that follow, will do so on the fringes of modernity and on the outskirts of cultural familiarity. The encroachment of electricity and its engineered modernity that is present in currents reaching places where “electricity is not even a rumor,” will raise a finger to the map of exotics and isolate a location, foretelling a collision of primitivism and civilization.

The result is Rumors of Electricity, Krech’s atlas, where “the present can’t help but intrude into the past.” Krech documents time and place as abutting in regions that don’t require the artificial assistance of illumination, and are instead elucidated with the controlled description and restrained imagery expected of a poet charting unexplored territory.

Undoubtedly, however, Krech’s greatest achievement in this collection is his ability to create what he refers to in “After Atget” as “nostalgia for a place we’ve never been.” This sentiment is perhaps best encapsulated in the longest poem of the book, “Nishat Bagh Revisited”:

The time from then to now
merged from one moment to the next
in increments so small
and so powerful
that knowledge of their mechanism
is knowledge of the entire universe.

A universe, that is, which assimilates the conception of both time and locality as existing within the poem’s place. In support of such abstractions, however, Krech is at his best in poems like “No Pain,” where he creates for the reader a sense of space that is clearly rendered; yet time is allowed merely to suggest, as it assumes the manner of water sliding across land, seeping into the dry terrain. This blending of the historical past with the collection’s sand and dust form the amalgamation of place:

Wooden teashop
strategically built
on bight of shore
surrounded on three sides
by the Chitral River

Windows open to the air,
With no panes.

If the settings of Krech’s poems are unknown, they are vivid in their separateness and exoticism. Reader perception should not be influenced as readily by a lack of electricity as by the shadow of its reach that inches everyday closer and foretells the kind of disparity reflected in “In the Blue Room”:

The men wear turbans [often black]
and loose robes [often blue]
very few women in the street.
The children wear modern clothes.

The process of coming to terms with the concept that a “brief spark from any moment in time infuses the present” as an electrical discharge, or a synaptic firing within the psyche, generates the sort of understanding that Krech implies—truly, it does all begin with you.

We are the place: the embodiment of the time and location wires that Krech longs to connect, to witness them meeting in each of his seventeen poems in a series of sparks that solidify humanity’s unified presence. If “we are all here at once,” our presence in Rumors of Electricity is as much a reflection of time as it of place.

Erin McKnight is a Scottish writer now living in Dallas, and is Fiction Editor for Prick of the Spindle. Her writing has been widely published online and in print, in venues including flashquake, Ginosko Literary Journal, and PRECIPICe. Her short nonfiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and inclusion in W.W. Norton’s The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume 3. Erin holds an MFA in creative writing with a specialization in fiction, and is currently at work on an MA in literary linguistics.

© 2008 prickofthespindle.com