Peter Mladinic reviews
Present Tense by John Yamrus

John Yamrus’s Present Tense has a persona who is and is not John Yamrus.  His lines forge that paradox. His poems, lean and lucid, go to the heart of the adage: poetry is more about questions than answers. They are about secrets hiding in plain sight and the mystery of beginnings and endings. They are moments in the persona’s life and ultimately in the reader’s. The reader breathes the air the persona breathes, and walks a mile in the persona’s shoes. Yamrus makes his world ours by getting right to the heart of the matter, saying more with less, and saying it with an elegance that accents the dignity of being alive. 

At the end of his introduction to Present Tense, Cody Sexton, founder of the Anxiety Press, writes “Be prepared to confront your own assumptions and gain a renewed appreciation for the subtle forces shaping our existence.”  John Yamrus the poet has a kindred soul in Frank O’Connor the fiction writer. O’Connor is at heart a poet.  Like O’Connor, Yamrus gets right to down to business and knows human relations and writes about them sparingly, eloquently. 

There’s an immediacy to these poems about people. “it was,” based on a memory of an open mic reading in the speaker’s remote past, is a metaphor for anyone singled out and made to feel uneasy in a group gathering such as a meeting or even a party.  

look who
just walked in …
Peter, Paul, and Mary!

that
was funny …

but
it stung
and it stuck
and it taught me
something that I learned
right then and there and never forgot.

Yamrus, vulnerable, resourceful, makes the reader want to know the speaker’s life lesson. His tone, with “right then and there” compels. The reader is at the speaker’s side, sitting next to him, at that open mic event. Fifty years ago is now.

Poem after poem, Yamrus packs in the most meaning with the least words. His spare style is at work in “she.”  His simile likens the sound of her name to “a bottle of cheap perfume.” That’s followed by the irony “nearly everything/ in her life started with an ending.”  Like the pronoun title, the circumstances of the moment, the time and place she is in, are open-ended. The metaphor, “this …a door that would not stay open long” is precisely hers and the reader’s. Metaphorically the poet creates an uncluttered room in which every item, like that bottle of cheap perfume, is utilized.  What’s there is made more meaningful but what’s not there, by what the poet holds back. The moment is heightened by the speaker’s conclusion: “it/ was now,/ or/ never.” This spare style characterizes “jerry lee hits,” a poem with a lot of animation, and, like “it was,” a gathering of people.”  Jerry Lee’s fight is likened to the fight at the beginning of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, “only/ there’s a lot/less at stake.” Toward the end

his
nose
was broke.

his 
lip was split

and 
he might
have bit thru
a part of his tongue,

but,
god-damn,
this was fun, and

nobody 
in the world

was gonna tell him it wasn’t.

Consider what would be lacking if the line “in the world” was missing, and consider the irony signaled by “but.  The spare setting heightens the animation when, mid-poem, Jerry Lee “threw the five on the floor.”

Ironically, eloquence pervades the poem with the colloquial title “I’ve been shit on.”

By the end the reader concurs “I’ve been shit on too, and often. The speaker’s chant-like rhythms “ the critics/ who/ dislike me/ my poems/ my attitude/ my way of writing/ or/ just: my way of seeing things” intensify his utterance. He ends with a deflection that suggests: so what,  this happens, get over it. That’s life. In “he said:” Someone worries about bills to pay, a job, and an uncertain future. The elegance is profound, in that the speaker tells this person the truth that comes from experience; he doesn’t sugar-coat it. There’s always be bills to pay, a job or something similar to toil at, and an uncertain future.

and the secret 
to it all

is
to go 
and make a life

around them.

Present Tense is John Yamrus at his best. He informs and entertains. With no preaching, no padding, no fillers, Present Tense doesn’t tell readers how to live but reminds them that they do. 

Peter Mladinic's most recent book of poems, House Sitting, is available from Anxiety Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.

John Yamrus has published numerous volumes of poetry, two novels, and several volumes of non-fiction. His most recent books are The Street, a memoir; and Present Tense, a book of poems.