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(first appeared in Angle, Volume 3, Issue 2, Autumn/Winter 2014)

Norman Ball
'Serpentrope'
White Violet Press, 2013
If I told you that most of the poems in Norman Ball's Serpentrope are
metered and rhymed, with four-fifths of them sonnets, you'd probably
get the wrong idea. So we'll consider that a bit later. Instead, let's begin
with the eclectic nature of the book.
I believe Serpentrope is the only poetry book published to date that contains poems on the
topics of: Civil War battle fatigue; formal poetry in its relation to a famous wardrobe
malfunction; and Aleister Crowley's Cult of Lam. The poems often display a love of detail
historic and currentas in this excerpt from 'Observations of a Civil War Surgeon As Night
Falls':

Cattail and catgut duel within the marsh
that clads the Susquehanna east of York.
Two minstrels, facing off, interpret harsh
conditions with guitars. The river's fork
accompanies with stiff, percussive reeds.
Ball's poems stem from an obvious intelligence, and that seems appropriate. Often they
mimic the way that neurophysiologists characterize our thinking process: as the firing up of
nodes of meaning that excite other nodes in a sort of spreading activation, until a whole
pattern of nodesperhaps previously unconnectedfires together, leading to new
connections and novel insights. None of this, according to the theory, is sentential. Sentences
come later. This mental commotion underlying conscious thought is echoed in Ball's poetry
in passages such as this from the poem 'Formal Spat ':

... One dares

not ride a colleague's time-worn rhyme. Left-hand feet
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may dangle. Diction may rankle, stubborn
with vague intent. Relax. Sonnets can't meet
the rent with a metered stick...

Or this, from 'It Was A Totter From The Start':
The duty steeped itself in stand-up time,
a rope to drag the day upon itself
with busying to coax the febrile mind
from thought, to book, to browse, to empty shelf.

Many of Ball's poems employ puns, allusions, and apparently unrelated content. The result is
that they often excite neurons in our minds that, at least for me, are firing together for the
first time. This type of mental fireworks can be fatiguing, and it may be that the best way to
read Serpentrope is to limit oneself to two or three poems a day.
I may have mentioned that Ball's poems take on a wide variety of subjects. Serpentrope
includes poems centered on: the cartoon character Dilbert rendered in a Hilbertian sonnet;
dropping poems by airplane on Afghan villagers in wartime; and ballerinas with bulimia. And
often the poems render their subjects in witty, punning, allusive lines. Like these in an excerpt
from the poem about Dilbert, the cartoon engineer working in a cubicle in a large
corporation:

... Dilbert stirs this pot with lead
balloons. His poker-face is barely drawn
by nine. Outside the box, Big Bosses rake
trapped miners over coals while overhead
a phosphor-fingered entity has sawn
animal spirits squarely down to size
three taut frames. Dilbert's zeppelin subsides.
Of course, like real-world explosions, explosions of meaning can do damage if not controlled,
and Ball is an explosives expert. These poems are nearly all contained in meter and rhyme,
and now that you have a feel for the content, it can more fully be revealed that most of them
are in sonnet form. The interplay between the subject matter, the allusions, and the forms
adds another dimension to the experience of reading Ball's work a dimension that I believe
elevates the wild content by the mere fact of being under such control.
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Given the eclectic nature of Serpentrope (I should mention that it contains poems on the
subjects of: belly fat; the fate of a member of the band REO Speedwagon; and the turbulent
life of the prophet Isaiah), it should be noted that the book also contains some recurring
themes.
The most explicit is that of the snake Ouroboros, a topic treated in several of the poems and
the subject of an essay included as an appendix to the book. The image of the snake with its
tail in its mouth, sometimes curled protectively around the earth and sometimes a part of it,
has, according to Ball's essay, fascinated him for years. In the poem 'Ouroboros,' Ball portrays
the snake in a menacing way:

...The proper name's Hell-
that cool, wrapped bitch trite circle. Let her clasp
sweet tail in teeth. All gray divides sell
foot-in-mouth diversions. I will have
my foe just-so. Discrete obsession. Damn
all demons who arrive. The golden calf,
zirconia stalking horse, is lamb
I dressed for slaughter...

But it is not always so. Sometimes the snake is a hoop snake rolling along, and sometimes it
is a snake completing a cosmic circle.
Another theme in the book is that of human relations. Serpentrope does not contain a love
poem as I understand them, but there are multiple renderings of soured or difficult
relations between couples. The concluding lines from the poem 'Endure' are one example:

... We gratify
what synapses are lit. Hullabaloo
is all that floats abovemere atmosphere.
What anchors? That's a fixity less clear.
The reader of Serpentrope will soon see that Ball is no sentimentalist.
Poetry itself forms another theme in the book. There are multiple poems on the topic of
poetry, a theme that first appears in the inscription that begins the book:
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Teach a man to write poetry
and he will starve forever.
Ball begins the poem 'Twickenham Stadium' by stating 'I'm not so much a poet as a wit,' and
then proceeds to compare himself and his work to the career of the American baseball player
Harmon Killebrew, a Hall of Famer who, nonetheless, had some years with low numbers of
runs batted in. Poets writing poems about poetry can be trying, but Ball pulls it offin this
case, with extended comparisons between his work and baseball. Let's consider two
techniques that I particularly admire in Ball's work. The first is the clever enjambment, and
the second is the killer concluding couplet. One of my favorite poems in the book is the
sonnet 'At the Funeral of a Former High School Crush,' which begins with the wonderful
enjambment
I memorized her purple halter top
to bottom...

The poem then describes time shared together in physics class, and concludes with this
couplet that brings us back to the funeral of the title:
They found her with her head arrayed in glass
flung forward like a weightless, prescient gas.
I love that couplet. And many others in Ball's book. One more example. In the poem 'Slither,'
that begins with a quote from Coleridge referencing Ouroboros, the narrator learns that a
walk with his lover is actually her way of finding a suitable place to terminate their
relationship. She has chosen the bookstore where they met to end things in Ouroboran
fashion, and the poem itself concludes:
... All along,
this princess had availed a serpent-guide.
I was the frog to her formaldehyde.
Serpentrope is a book of formal poems that really doesn't feel like one. It treats a wide variety
of topics (I should mention that Serpentrope contains poems on: the antediluvian apostasies
of G. H. Pember; the difficulties in Ireland; and the nature of testimony in the aftermath of
the mortgage meltdowns). There are wonderful gems, couplets, and full poems that sparkle
and explode. Serpentrope is a virtuoso performance by a poet of wide-ranging intelligence
whose careful use of form adds considerable impact to his work.
--David Davis