David Holper

Across the Grid of Streets is an ambitious first book of poems. Unlike so many of his free verse peers, Quincy R. Lehr demonstrates a contemporary versatility with blank verse and rhyme; he combines this facility with a streetwise and savvy syntax that serves to reinvigorate both form and language. Lehr takes us on obligatory tours of drunken nights, disaffected lives (his own and others’); through bars charged with ennui, with a necessary pack of cigarettes and another cup of coffee, through failing or failed relationships, and ultimately through death itself. Yet what raises the collection above such familiar subject matter is that he is willing to pose significant questions about what such contemporary existence means. And his use of multiple perspectives — most often plural first person (we/us) — serves an invitation to us to enter this exploration with him.

Even in Lehr’s opening salvo “A Shot Rang Out,” a poem about his failure to wake in the night to the sound of gunfire in his neighborhood, he presents us with a disturbed world that he’s become so accustomed to that he feels guilt for his failure to awaken to gunfire outside his door. Thus:

When morning came, I felt like I had failed,
Grown jaded and uncaring, with each lock,
Each buzzer, and each key a talisman
Of chosen and indifferent isolation.

His only explanation for this is that “It’s all too much sometimes — the paper cups/ With jangling change, the noises from the street/ Exhaling threats, malt liquor, and stale smoke./ I slept through gunfire just outside my door.”

One delightful element that helps relieve such a disturbed atmosphere is Lehr’s sharp sense of wit, both in looking at his fallibility, as well as the existential quandary he presents.  In “Alternative Rock Song,” he laments, “Drunker with each snifter downed/And older by the minute/You wonder where the trouble lies/Despite your drowning in it.” Too, his self-deprecating humor lightens the ennui that pervades the collection, and in “Time Zones” his reflections on his younger, hip self are particularly amusing:

                                        At seventeen
My hair was black; lips twisted in a smirk.
A pissed professor’s son, smart-assed jerk,
A bookworm almost trying to be mean,
I would hold forth on something that I’d read —
Or read about — and feeling very smart,
I’d talk some more.  The crap I must have said
Would mortify me now (or so I’d think)  —
I’ll blame it on all the coffee that I’d drink.

Of course, no collection of this sort could go without a strong sense of alienation, in Lehr’s life as well as in the society that he now looks back at from his expatriate position in Dublin.  The exploration ranges backward into Lehr’s youth (as well as his father’s and great-grandfather’s histories), which serves to explain his disengagement with contemporary society, especially religion (his great-grandfather was a pastor), tenure track positions (his father was a professor), and all other manners of stable, bourgeois life. In his critique there are familiar salvos at the media, suburbia, relationships, marriage, the glib nature of society. However, what saves this exploration from cliché is that Lehr has the insight into the humanity of those involved, such as in Katie (a female figure who appears and re-appears throughout the collection) whose struggle manifests itself with her “sitting on her bed,/ Vaguely waiting for a husband, who/ Is doubtless caught in gridlock’s tangled knots./ Restless, bored, with nothing else to do,/ She loses herself in soaps and whiskey shots.”  Or later in the same poem “Inebriate/ She wanders up and down the stairs, afraid/ of something she can name, but can’t quite state.”

Lehr turns this same focus on himself in describing how in caring for his dying father, he watches as:

The cancer wore out Dad; it dug and carved
Through lesions on his legs and through his mind.
A vagueness settled in his eyes, his voice
Went slurry, and we had no choice
Except to watch him go — befuddled, blind,
And gradually losing his words… 

In examining this question for how to create meaning in such an alienated, violent, and often meaningless landscape, Lehr ranges far and wide in his multiple-part poems, such as “The Joke,” “Continental Drift,” “William Montgomerey,” and “Time Zones.”  Sometimes this evolves as self-exploration; sometimes exploration of an idea or theme. Oddly enough, in “Time Zones,” an extended first-person history of his life, this is least effective, only re-sounding themes of urban angst and regret that are too well explored elsewhere. Much more interesting are his explorations of others, such as “The Joke,” which challenges the reader to explore the conundrum that “The Universe is the practical joke of the General/at the expense of the Particular…”  Or in his insights into how conventional roles such as his great-grandfather’s strangled any original and useful insight into how to live — both for himself and his parishioners. Or more interesting still in “Continental Drift” is his insight how most of us miss the larger questions of meaning, because we “so rarely think/ Of continental drift or of the sink/ And rise of land beyond a single life…. /Things seem stable/ When we observe them from the picnic table.”  Yet for those willing to follow his lead and probe the surface, answers are not always forthcoming, in part because of his patent distrust of any system, social, religious, or otherwise. Yet oddly enough, the answers that he does offer sound much like the age-old answers to such questions: Fate or Nature. Thus, we learn:

The cauterwauling stars exert a pull
Behind the rising moon, beyond control
Of will or best intentions, and the fates
Of lives are shifted like tectonic plates.

In the end, Lehr’s collection is a challenging exploration of our contemporary dilemmas. His collection invites readers to think in both language and forms beyond mere convention.  Though the answers to the questions that he poses are not always complete or entirely satisfying, he’s a capable enough poet to make the journey itself well worth while.