Flying for the Window by Charles Coté Reviewed by Eric Weinstein ISBN 978-1-59924-354-2
The elegy is an old form; it dates back at least as far as Archilochus, a Greek poet born on the island of Paros over two thousand years ago. Although it was not until the mid-eighteenth century that the style found favor with English-speaking audiences in the form of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, its history in English, it might be argued, is just as complex as that of its Greek antecedent. Charles Coté’s first collection, Flying for the Window, comprises poems that build on, respond to, and complicate the elegy as it is found in contemporary American poetry. Much as in a collection I have previously reviewed, Taylor Altman’s Swimming Back, and in Claudia Emerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Late Wife, Coté’s Flying for the Window is an extended apostrophe, an address to and concerning someone who has died. This lacuna of sorts—this vanished presence—permits Coté to explore emotional terrain that would be inaccessible were he speaking of or to his son while still alive; there are simply modes of expression we do not discover until after the person or persons with whom we wish to talk are no longer here. This lends a certain kind of honesty to the collection, and when combined with Coté’s starkness of language and expression makes for a powerful début collection. Readers familiar with John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud, Though Some Have Called Thee” (Divine Sonnet X) and John Gunther’s memoir of the same title will be hard pressed not to bring both to bear in reading Flying for the Window; Gunther’s son, who died at approximately the same age as Coté’s, also succumbed to cancer, and both Gunther’s and Donne’s treatment of death and humility likely informed Coté as both a father and a poet. I mention Emerson above, and I think it appropriate to close with part of her description of Coté’s collection. She writes: “Darkly beautiful, the volume itself is a finely made window on loss and its aftermath, the complexities of survival.” I could not have said it better myself.
Visit Finishing Line Press on the web at http://www.finishinglinepress.com/ Prick of the Spindle Poetry Editor Eric Weinstein recently graduated magna cum laude from Duke University with an AB in English and Philosophy. His writing has previously appeared in a variety of online and print publications, including The Archive,Wheelhouse Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, and Rainy Day. His poetry hasbeen nominated for inclusion in Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the SmallPresses (2009). A native of New Hampshire, he currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.
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