The Ghost of Harrison Sheets
by Jeremy Gaulke
$5.00
The Temple Inc.

The Ghost of Harrison Sheets

Jeremy Gaulke is a romantic, but not a dreamy namby pampy romantic. Rather, his line runs all the way back to Shelley and Keats and Byron and that crew who loved deeply, tragically, comically, messily. Though Gaulke never uses the sonnet form, you can hear in his modern lines echoes of the same spirit that moved a young Shelley to poetry:

 

i loved the way most boys do
i loved too much
and drove you away

i wrap the sheets around me
to soak the sweat of summer
the sheets you left in my
typewriter
and i can't stand
the parts of me
you left alone
and the parts of me you stayed
with

So often a twenty year old poet will adopt a world-weary pose to convince us that he or she is someone we need to pay attention to, that despite their short life, they have lived, goddammit. But Gaulke's work is authentic. He wears sadness like a well loved coat, something patched and frayed around the edges, but something which is familiar and comfortable.

my legs were always wet before we
reached the shore and
the wood we used for the first fire
was older than any of us

the lake we found later, in the middle
of the largest island, was red with ancient
sediment and the sins of every man
who sought it

 

Gaulke is unafraid of his experiences, the homosexual and heterosexual grapplings, neither of which seems to fill him with anything but desperation. This is desperate poetry at its most lyrical, the kind of suicide note a young man would write while deciding whether pills and alcohol would work quicker or slower: The suicide note of a man who lived through it.

It does wear on the reader about page 40. While there's a certain charm to a long poem about waiting for his hash browns, there's also much of the journal about the entry, a mundanity which falls flat after the wild romanticism of the rest of the work.

But this is quibbling. Jeremy Gaulke, at twenty, has written a chapbook that most poets would strive their careers to create. One hopes he continues to survive love and loss to bring more to the table.

Highly recommended.